It seems to me that the sheet effect animation needs to be considerably sped up. Even better would be to have the speed configurable from the settings.
Agreed. The scale and glide effects use 160ms duration whereas sheet uses a whopping 500ms by default.
That explains it!
I'm against changing the defaults, but making the duration option configurable is sensible.
I really do think that the default is much too high. I suppose the only way to know if this is common opinion to poll users.
(In reply to Michael D from comment #4) > I really do think that the default is much too high. I suppose the only way > to know if this is common opinion to poll users. Well, it's been like that for many years. Maybe, we could revisit the defaults in the next major release.
Even if we make the duration configurable, I agree that the current duration is a bit too high. Not by that much though: 160ms would probably be too fast.
The effect is older than the configuration system for the effects. The setting was chosen because most of the fancy effects we added at that time were at 500 ms. E.g. cube (which was implemented around the same time) also uses 500 ms for the animation. The high duration was chosen to put emphasis on the effect (after all it's not default) and was certainly also to a large degree as we couldn't do smooth short animations at that time. Both arguments certainly changed - at least on Wayland we are able to do fast animations of new windows (on X11 this is still sometimes problematic) and we don't need the compiz showoff effects as in 2008.
It sounds very reasonable to me to revisit defaults, especially in light of Martin's comments.
I'm afraid that by decreasing the animation duration we can screw up the whole perception of this effect. Not subtle effect + short animation duration is not the greatest combination (my personal opinion). If Martin is not against changing the defaults of the Sheet effect, we could decrease the duration to 300ms, for example. Also, we won't need to add yet another KCM. :-) FWIW, you can change animation duration by editing ~/.config/kwinrc. All what you need to do is just add the following lines: [Effect-Sheet] AnimationTime=300
... if we would like to use a short animation duration, then we probably have to animate the opacity as well.
300 ms could be worth a try.
I tested out 300ms and it definitely feels better to me, but I can see that making it much faster can ruin the smoothness of the effect.
I just tried the effect in wayland and it doesn't even work. Might be related to bug 398100.
(In reply to Michael D from comment #13) > I just tried the effect in wayland and it doesn't even work. Might be > related to bug 398100. No, that's bug 377103.
(In reply to Vlad Zagorodniy from comment #14) > (In reply to Michael D from comment #13) > > I just tried the effect in wayland and it doesn't even work. Might be > > related to bug 398100. > No, that's bug 377103. Thanks!
Git commit 57f313e5003aeeea4b5034e62a7463d4f70b9975 by Vlad Zagorodniy. Committed on 22/10/2018 at 07:11. Pushed by vladz into branch 'master'. [effects/sheet] Decrease the default animation duration Summary: For some historical reasons, the sheet effect uses animation duration of 500ms. In comparison to other effects that animate the appearing and the disappearing of windows, 500ms is too high value for the duration. As the title says, this change decreases the default animation duration to 300ms. The new duration is more saner. The opacity is animated to make the effect look smoother with the shorter animation duration. FIXED-IN: 5.15.0 Reviewers: #kwin, graesslin Reviewed By: #kwin, graesslin Subscribers: kwin Tags: #kwin Differential Revision: https://phabricator.kde.org/D16359 M +3 -1 effects/sheet/sheet.cpp https://commits.kde.org/kwin/57f313e5003aeeea4b5034e62a7463d4f70b9975