Cairo-Dock damages/repaints all of the dock windows if just one pixel in an applet changes

[MC Return]

This behavior produces unnecessary work for the graphics card and brings all the problems connected with that (more power drain/heat, less laptop battery life, etc.).

[Matthieu Baerts (matttbe)]

Hello,

Yes, it's true that these repaints could be optimised but repaints have already been minimised and having this feature could introduce new bugs, a more complex code (harder to maintain) and most of the time, the dock has to be resized (when adding/removing icons, moving the mouse inside the dock, producing effects over more than one icon, etc.) and all the window has to be repainted. Note that it shouldn't take too much resources, specially when using hardware acceleration.

But if you (or someone else) have an idea to improve the situation without introducing side effects, feel free to propose it here :-)

[MC Return (mc-return)]

matttbe, thanks for your comment.

I have not yet read much of cairo-dock's code, but when doing damaging code work I found Compiz' Show Repaint plugin to be very useful as it allows one to exactly visually observe what the damaging code is doing and which repaints are exactly happening.

Currently my time is very limited, but I might look into it in the future (after I've got a build-and-run-cairo-dock-from-source procedure set up).