st could easily tear/flicker with animation or other unattended
output. This commit eliminates most of the tear/flicker.
Before this commit, the display timing had two "modes":
- Interactively, st was waiting fixed `1000/xfps` ms after forwarding
the kb/mouse event to the application and before drawing.
- Unattended, and specifically with animations, the draw frequency was
throttled to `actionfps`. Animation at a higher rate would throttle
and likely tear, and at lower rates it was tearing big frames
(specifically, when one `read` didn't get a full "frame").
The interactive behavior was decent, but it was impossible to get good
unattended-draw behavior even with carefully chosen configuration.
This commit changes the behavior such that it draws on idle instead of
using fixed latency/frequency. This means that it tries to draw only
when it's very likely that the application has completed its output
(or after some duration without idle), so it mostly succeeds to avoid
tear, flicker, and partial drawing.
The config values minlatency/maxlatency replace xfps/actionfps and
define the range which the algorithm is allowed to wait from the
initial draw-trigger until the actual draw. The range enables the
flexibility to choose when to draw - when least likely to flicker.
It also unifies the interactive and unattended behavior and config
values, which makes the code simpler as well - without sacrificing
latency during interactive use, because typically interactively idle
arrives very quickly, so the wait is typically minlatency.
While it only slighly improves interactive behavior, for animations
and other unattended-drawing it improves greatly, as it effectively
adapts to any [animation] output rate without tearing, throttling,
redundant drawing, or unnecessary delays (sounds impossible, but it
works).
This patch must be applied on the externalpipe patch. It adds the
function externalpipein to redirect the standard output of the external
command to the slave size of the pty, that is, as if the external
program had been manually executed on the terminal. It can be used to
send desired escape sequences to the terminal with a shortcut.
I created the patch to make use of the dynamic-colors program
(https://github.com/sos4nt/dynamic-colors) that uses the OSC escape
sequences to change the colors of the terminal. The program keeps the
last colorscheme selected in a file, so you can use it to select the
colorscheme for all newly opened terminals from that moment on. If you
want to change the color of the background and foreground independently
from the palette, you have to merge in the patch for the OSC escape
sequences 10, 11, and 12.
This patch includes the changes of the externalpipe sigaction patch to
prevent reseting the signal handler for SIGCHLD when the proces of the
external command exits.
bakkeby