Scratchpad breaks with Awesome 3.5

[psivesely]

As detailed at http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Scratchpad_manager, the scratchpad manager was written for awesome 3.4 and, at least for me using any of these default configs, breaks with awesome 3.5. It occasionally works on an empty tagspace, but most often even then stays almost completely hidden at the top. I can still use it, I just can't see what I'm writing because it only drops down a few pixels, exposing the very bottom of the terminal. I use terminator terminal, but I just tried it with urxvt and that failed as well.

[lcpz]

The module has been adapted for 3.5+ too, so it doesn't break.

You first prove it by saying it shows up with uncorrect geometry.

Your 'problem' is just that default scratch.drop height value is somehow not enough for your setup, hence you've got to increase it a little.

This is what you can read from in-code documentation of scratch/drop.lua:

--   scratch.drop(prog, vert, horiz, width, height, sticky, screen)
--
-- Parameters:
--   prog   - Program to run; "urxvt", "gmrun", "thunderbird"
--   vert   - Vertical; "bottom", "center" or "top" (default)
--   horiz  - Horizontal; "left", "right" or "center" (default)
--   width  - Width in absolute pixels, or width percentage
--            when <= 1 (1 (100% of the screen) by default)
--   height - Height in absolute pixels, or height percentage
--            when <= 1 (0.25 (25% of the screen) by default)
--   sticky - Visible on all tags, false by default
--   screen - Screen (optional), mouse.screen by default

so, considering my configs, try replacing

-- Dropdown terminal
awful.key({ modkey,           }, "z",      function () drop(terminal) end),

with something like this

-- Dropdown terminal
awful.key({ modkey,           }, "z",      function () drop(terminal, "top", "center", 1, 0.5) end),

[psivesely]

The default setup is 25% of the height of a 15.6 laptop inch, so there should be no reason I need to change it in the first place, but realistically I see ~.25% regardless of what settings I use. I tried a variety of different pixel and percentage based settings. I am using Awesome 3.5.1 compiled against Lua 5.2.2.

[lcpz]

The default setup is 25% of the height and 100% of the width of the screen, regardless of the screen size.

Try using this version of drop.lua.

[psivesely]

Yes, I realize what percent means. Anyway, that version of drop.lua produces the same bug for me.

[psivesely]

The few times it has very sporadically worked, it displayed at ~25% height and ~75% screen width. Since using the git version of drop.lua, I've noticed the small sliver of the app that is now exposed drops from the very top of the screen instead of right below my statusbar and is very slightly taller (maybe a few pixels) and significantly less wide (went from ~75% to ~15% of screen width). The height increase was just enough to realize that I am only seeing the top few pixels of my window and not the bottom. If I had the time I would try to learn some lua and figure out what was going wrong, but for now I am happy to try any suggestions you have or look for an alternative solution.

[lcpz]

I'm happy that you realize, but I was correcting this statement of yours:

The default setup is 25% of the height of a 15.6 laptop inch

because it was false.

You're getting that behaviour because it's the original version, which considers only the workarea.

Honestly, the fact that you tried different arguments in drop without having a change seems odd, but if you're sure that it's not something related to your machine, then I can't help you further.

Report to the author: anrxc.

[lcpz]

I'm closing this because it's not an awesome-copycats issue.

Yours is a quite unique behavior, which everybody using scratchpad never had.

But if you solve it, feel free to email me to tell how.

[psivesely]

I emailed anxrc and in the meantime found a workaround. The problem is that the scratchpad is floating by default. When in floating layout it works fine, but in any tiled layout it hides out at the top of the screen. If I use the hotkey for awful.client.floating.toggle any app will have this problem in a tiled layout. So I simply use it to toggle the scratchpad off floating and when I want to use it it appears as a tile.

[psivesely]

SOLVED: Updated from Arch Community repository's "awesome 3.5.1-2" to Arch User repository's "awesome-git," i.e., v3.5.1-15-gabd8246 and now it works perfectly.

[lcpz]

Very strange, working effortlessly in 3.5.1 for me, but anyway it's good to hear that.