blockify-ui fails to get client list properties
tohn opened this issue · 2 comments
I upgraded today to the newest version in the AUR on Arch Linux and now I have the following problem:
If I start blockify-ui in the shell, the GUI won't start. Instead I get this ca. each second in the shell:
Cannot get client list properties.
(_NET_CLIENT_LIST or _WIN_CLIENT_LIST)
After reading some issues, I added start_minimized = False to the gui-section in the configfile. Now the GUI will start, but will always mute Spotify because of the error above.
I use dwm and it worked with blockify 3.3.
Reading the window client list with DISPLAY=:0 xwininfo -tree -root (source) or lsw (source) works though.
Hi tohn,
the problem with windows and their title is that not every window manager handles them the same. Xwininfo might be an interesting alternative to wmctrl. However, i fear that switching from wmctrl to xwininfo does not really address the root cause which is looking at window titles in the first place. Blockify uses the window title mainly to detect video ads which show up rarely and only if Spotify is not minimized, as far as i know. I have only had a handful of them in months. You can probably disable them altogether by editing your /etc/hosts file. The Spotify-AdKiller project has a branch that blocks video ads completely by blocking the connection via DNS in this way.
My suggested solution for now is to add an option to disable window title usage, called use_window_title (section general).
Feel free to set that option to False and report your experience. I'll publish the new version in a couple of minutes.
Awesome! Thanks a lot! :-)