GTK 2.18, GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS, and Xfce

Mark Kane mark at mkproductions.org
Fri Jan 15 22:33:15 CET 2010


Hi everyone.

Since updating to GTK 2.18 a while ago, I started noticing screen
corruption/artifacts in several GTK applications. Setting
GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 before launching applications clears the issue up
right away.

My question is, what is the best way to handle this in Xfce? Terminal
for example experiences the corruption unless GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS is set
which I have done through the launcher entry, but several other
applications also have issues without it set so it seems incorrect to
have to do this manually for every one.

Is there a way to set this environment variable globally for all
applications launched through any method in Xfce? I have tried
setting/exporting it in ~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc and my own ~/.cshrc many
times and different ways to see if it would help, however it does not
seem to have any effect. 

From searching online I haven't found a huge amount of reports of
people having to set this manually for many applications, so is there
something I might be missing on it in general? From my understanding, a
change in GTK 2.18 might require applications to be updated to be
compatible, and GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 turns off the new client side
window feature and restores the previous behavior. I haven't seen many
mentions of this being required for Xfce software like Terminal.

Some examples of software that require this to be set to work
properly are Xfce's Terminal, xfwm4-settings (the keyboard tab gets
corrupted if not set), Midori, Claws-Mail, and gLabels.

For the Xfce apps, do those need to be updated to be compatible with
GTK 2.18, or might there be another issue here specific to my setup?

Thanks very much in advance,

-Mark
FreeBSD 8.0-STABLE [amd64]
xfce-4.6.1
Terminal-0.4.3

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