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UI Experiment: Hide Windows During Exit
AbandonedPublic

Authored by Harley Acheson (harley) on Sep 18 2021, 7:48 PM.

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User Interface
Summary

Incomplete patch that hides windows during our exit process to make
it feel a bit snappier and responsive when closing.


If you launch blender and load an existing file, then make some small change (move something), then quit. At the prompt to save just say "no". At that point we are closing when we have undo items which means we save an "undo.blend" file.

There have been some grumbles (T91452) that when this file is large the user is left staring at a grey and unresponsive screen while it saves. It does annoy users to force them to stare at a blank screen after closing. It makes the program seem wonky, heavy, or bloated. You've dismissed it and it is taking longer than necessary to get out of the way. So the following patch just HIDES the windows first so it feels a lot snappier, less bloaty. Just gets out of the way immediately and does its thing in the background.

It should work as advertised for Windows and SDL (although untested), but only has TODO comments for X11, Wayland, and Mac - although should do no harm on those platforms, they just won't hide the windows.

Diff Detail

Repository
rB Blender

Event Timeline

Harley Acheson (harley) requested review of this revision.Sep 18 2021, 7:48 PM
Harley Acheson (harley) created this revision.

Maybe you have answers for this already, but:

If a user, closes blender and then find it running in the background using task manager.
They may think they have a virus infection or there is a problem with their file saving process.

Also, if the user get used to the screen disappearing suddenly,
they may not recognize when a crash happen?

You may get a lot of bug report about that behavior,
since it is not standard or expected behavior,
not many will ask first before they file a bug report ;).

I have installed on my system, calibre book manager,
and it always takes a while to close. And it does what you're describing here,
by hiding itself.
Sometimes it takes more than 5 minutes before it really closes.

At first I thought, this was a buggy behavior or some sort of spyware.
And went online trying to find out why it was doing that...

I still think there maybe a problem there,
just don't know what to put and bug report ...

@Nabil Adel (mywa880) - I have installed on my system, calibre book manager... Sometimes it takes more than 5 minutes before it really closes.

This should only ever be a second or so at the most. This time when blender is unresponsive and displays a grey screen is only the actual time required to save "quit.blend." Blender doesn't really do much else during shutdown that takes any appreciable time.

Also show "waiting" mouse cursor until end of quit process. Should generally be never seen, but only noticed if it takes a while for some reason.

Removing the "wait" mouse cursor change since this had no effect.