Deno desktop - none of window events seem to trigger/work ?!

[bloor]

Deno 2.9.3
Windows 11
The most minimal example possible.

main.ts

// i need to server  http://localhost:3000/
const win = new Deno.BrowserWindow({
    title: "My App",
    width: 300,
    height: 800,
    transparentTitlebar: false,
    frameless: false
});

win.navigate("http://google.com");


const win2 = new Deno.BrowserWindow({
    title: "My App",
    width: 300,
    height: 800,
    transparentTitlebar: false,
    frameless: false
});

win2.navigate("http://localhost:3000/login");

win.addEventListener("close", async (e:any) =>{
    e.preventDefault();
    alert("Window is closing");

    win.close();
    win2.close();
});

i tried with "close", "move", "resize"
i tried with applying the eventlistener on win and win2

And this not the only issue with minimal example.

• frameless: true .. is not frameless, you can still see the border
• nuxt4 does not work as in the example by simply doing deno desktop --hmr ., in the end i had to run the dev server separately and then run deno desktop --hmr main.ts
• backend = webview not working for me (sometimes windows open/start .. most of the time don't), only with cef seems I get reliable outcome.
• processes hanging in the background if the dev-process not closed correctly and then blocking next execution because some zombie Laufey.exe instances
• plenty "could not write/ could not read" compilation/build errors during dev phase.

The point being .. the project seems highly not reliable (even for a "beta"/not-ready-for-production) and documentation is very poor even in this "early" state of the project.
Literally not even 1 full code example. Only chunks of code.

[bartlomieju]

Thanks for the detailed report. I ran your exact code on Deno 2.9.3 / macOS (webview backend), both packaged and under --hmr, and the window events do fire — close, move, and resize all trigger, and your close handler runs when the window's close button is clicked.

What happens next in your snippet is probably what made it look dead: alert() in the backend process shows a native modal dialog (Dialogs docs) and synchronously blocks the entire event loop — every timer and event handler stalls until OK is clicked. The dialog can also open behind the window. So the app freezes and, since nothing ever exits the process after the windows close, it lingers in the background — which matches your "processes hanging / blocking next execution" symptom. For a close-confirmation flow, prefer the pattern from the Windows docs (await win.executeJs("confirm(...)")) and call Deno.exit() when your last window closes.

That said, you did surface real bugs, which I've confirmed and filed as #36119: programmatic win.close() segfaults the app on macOS/webview, and setPosition() lands windows at wrong coordinates on multi-display setups. The frameless: true complaint is real too but already tracked — options are silently ignored on the first Deno.BrowserWindow because it adopts the startup window (#35635, #35969); creating a second window is the current workaround. The Nuxt --hmr issue is tracked in #35899.

On documentation: fair point about complete examples. There is one — denidian, a small note-taking app covering windows, menus, HMR, and packaging — but it was only linked from the 2.9 blog post. denoland/docs#3421 adds it to the desktop docs.

[bloor]

It's development on Windows 11. As for the mentioned "alert" .. it remained there because i tried all the other scenarios w/o a feedback. They did not work, so i added the alert.

Well, glad someone already tracking these issues and i'm not crazy.
Fairly frustrated because I heard about deno-desktop alternative to Tauri2 and had my hopes moderate-to-high.
And when I binged 6h doing this and that and not being able to obtain a minimal working project, i kind of got fed up. Afterall we talking about a project with 2 files and less than 50 lines of code.

Regarding the constant issues with webview but not with cef .. could be a misconfigured windows 11 on my part (it is not the cleanest windows by far). Did the minimal checks and I have WebView2 installed and all. But maybe it;s not running , since i uninstalled Edge. I don't know .. a more verbose error should at least help.
Point being, even though i target win10/win11 users with my app .. i do not feel assured to not release it under CEF.

• maybe it would be cool for app to self-diagnose and do minimal checks

I will retry a clean start project on weekend, because i see the potential of Deno desktop.

[bloor]

I started fresh ..
PC Restart
New project

The window events work as intended and from first try. 😠
For the Nuxt/Deno tandem start , temproray fix I use:
deno task dev

and i changed the dev script in package.json to

"dev": "nuxt dev & deno desktop --hmr main.ts",

[mefistofelix]

same here, but no windows restart or deno project reset nor deno applocal/deno reset make it work
simply nothing appears on screen and stuck processes in background after ctrl+c