emacs interferes with window manager when Assistive Technologies enabled

[Olivier Roche]

Binary package hint: emacs22-gtk

Distribution release: Ubuntu 8.10 intrepid
emacs22-gtk version : 22.2-0ubuntu2 (intrepid)

Historic:
 22/10/2008 Installation of ubuntu8.10 intrepid on u210 via usb key (key built with usb-creator, 'live mode' fully updated 22/10/2008) on u2010 in dual boot with Vista (had to use the 'makeactive' grub cmd to make it work).
After installation reupdated everything, installed package "emacs22" (OK Alt-tab working)
This afternoon 22/10/2008 updated all packages that needed to be updated, then decided to have a look to "orca" package and simultaneously try the package "emacs22.gtk".
Bug description:
After I installed those 2 packages "Alt-tab" started to freeze gnome when pressed from an emacs window (a bit like if X11 event where being held somewhere, mouse inoperative too). The only way to get out of this mess is to switch to a virtual console using a driver low level cmd like Ctrl-Alt-F1 and then switch back to X11 (the Alt-tab event and the ones I blindly type after seem ONLY THEN to reach the pgms ...)
The bug seems to be really related to emacs22-gtk as switching between 2 xterms, firefox etc is OK, also switching TO an emacs22-gtk window is OK, what does not work for some strange reason is switching OUT of an emacs22-gtk window.
I removed totally "orca" (no change), I remove my ".emacs" (no change).
I totally removed "emacs22-gtk" and installed "emacs22" in place and everything was OK again.

[Henrik Rydberg (rydberg)]

I am experiencing the exact same thing - down to the detail of trying out orca after updating.

Apart from the the alt-tab from the emacs window hanging the event queue somehow, I also notice that after starting up firefox, the very first click on the bookmarks menu results in the 'Edit This Bookmark' dialog popping up.

Both these problems smell regression, but since I also tried out Orca, which ran some script in the background, I wonder... I am adding the orca package to the affected packages list.

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

what window manager are you using? metacity or compiz?
--
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4

[Olivier Roche (olivierroche)]

Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> what window manager are you using? metacity or compiz?
>
metacity

[Richard Wolf (richard-wolf)]

I experienced the same problem, including having recently installed orca.

Uninstalling orca and then restarting fixed the problem for me.

[onur gungor (onurgu)]

Sorry but I saw this bug report just now, I have had opened another bug report. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/emacs22/+bug/294211

Marking it as a duplicate.

Anyway, I too had tried Orca after upgrading to 8.10 but one difference was that orca was installed before. So it is probably with Orca

One workaround I use to get out the situation is to switch keyboard layouts. I set the keyboard shortcut as pressing the two Shifts together.

[Mauricio Collares (mauricioc)]

Removing gnome-orca *and* at-spi did the trick for me. Emacs now starts with:

$ emacs
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "atk-bridge": libatk-bridge.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

... but everything works fine from this point on.

[Mauricio Collares (mauricioc)]

Or you can just go to System => Preferences => Assistive Technologies and uncheck 'Enable assistive technologies', in case you activated them accidentally by trying Orca. This is better than actually uninstalling Orca and at-spi.

Of course, the problem still remains for users that want/need those accessibility features.

[onur gungor (onurgu)]

Thanks Maurício,

I had removed orca but was not aware of at-spi. It solved my problem. Actually, I would like to use them too.

I think we may say that at least a workaround is found.

[wictor (viktor-bachraty)]

hi,
I am a gentoo user, and had the same issue with emacs (22.3.1) under gnome (2.22.3). Sometimes after a few seconds the windows got switched, but sometimes only switching to a konsole has rewaken the window manager ( Metacity) . Turning off Assistive Technologies resolved the problem.

[andreas (ahock)]

I can confirm this here (emacs-gtk 22.2-0ubuntu2), including the workaround of turning off orca in System->Preferences->Assistive Technologies.

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

I don't think this is orca specific, it seems to be assistive technology framework specific.

[era (era)]

So is everyone using Metacity or does this affect Compiz too? The upstream Emacs bug I just linked has a forward link to a Metacity bug but I'm hesitant to add that to "also affects project" if it's not specific to Metacity.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392889

[Pablo J. E. Rodriguez (rodablo)]

I'm using metacity.

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 4:47 AM, era <email address hidden> wrote:
> So is everyone using Metacity or does this affect Compiz too?  The
> upstream Emacs bug I just linked has a forward link to a Metacity bug
> but I'm hesitant to add that to "also affects project" if it's not
> specific to Metacity.
>
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392889
>
> --
> emacs22-gtk in ubuntu8.10 freezes gnome when using Alt-tab
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/287577
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Javier Jardón (jjardon)]

Confirmed in latest Ubuntu jaunty.

No problem when you turn off the assitive technologies.

[Manuel Rego Casasnovas (mrego)]

The same here, with Intrepid and Jaunty.

It only happens with accessibility activated.

[Joseph Coffland (jcoffland)]

Please keep in mind that the title of this bug does not fully describe what is going on.

Bug #294211 was marked as duplicate. It's symptoms must also be captured!

From what I can tell it is not just an Alt-Tab issue but involves moving away from the emacs window. For example this same bug will also cause firefox to lock up if you move from emacs22-gtk to firefox on another screen. No Alt-Tab involved. Taking focus away from emacs22-gtk releases firefox. I have seen this happen with other applications too.

At least on Intrepid, disabling Assistive Technologies only changes the bug behavior.

[Radoslaw Grzanka (radoslawg)]

I confirm that. Specifically I confirm what jcoffland says. It merely requires moving focus out of the emacs to (i.e.) firefox.
It is most annoying.

Sometimes system freezes like for 10-15 seconds and sometimes it freezes to a point it requires kill from text console.

[era (era)]

Bug #68575 reports similar symptoms when resizing, for emacs-snapshot. Provisionally marking that as a duplicate.

[era (era)]

Upon closer inspection, that was probably a different problem after all. Marking as Invalid for emacs-snapshot. My bad.

[Javier Jardón (jjardon)]

Seems that this is not longer a problem with emacs23 ( see fedora bug comments: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=224611 )

[Gabe Gorelick (gabegorelick)]

I can confirm this using compiz with assistive technologies enabled.

[Gabe Gorelick (gabegorelick)]

I have been using emacs with compiz on and assistive technologies off for a few hours now and the bug seems gone.

[Jan Michael Ibanez (jmibanez)]

I'd like to point out that this is not window manager specific. I've been encountering this bug with awesome as my window manager (with a custom GNOME 2 session, where panel is set to '' and window manager is set to 'awesome'). If I remove Assistive Technologies from the startup (either by removing at-spi-registry* from the startup applications or toggling assistive technologies off), the bug disappears.

Similarly, running awesome from an .xinitrc/.xsession script without running at-spi-registry also has the bug disappear.

This is on both Jaunty and the most recent Karmic. Emacs is both emacs-snapshot-gtk and emacs-22-gtk.

[Gabe Gorelick (gabegorelick)]

This is working for me in karmic now. Can anyone confirm that they still encounter this bug?

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

This is fixed in Emacs23, which is included with Ubuntu 9.10 and Lucid (Ubuntu 10.04). It was reported against Ubuntu 8.10, which will be End Of Life for support when Ubuntu 10.04 releases on 2010-04-29. If this is still an issue for you, please upgrade your system to either Ubuntu 9.10 or Ubuntu 10.04.

[MartinDengler (mtd)]

I'm running GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.18.9) on F12 x86_64 and still seeing this issue.

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thanks for letting us know. Please report that issue in redhat to the redhat bug tracker.

[onyxrev (entp)]

I believe that this was indeed fixed in Jaunty, but I am almost certain that I have been experiencing the same bug. It was so bad that I switched to XFCE until I just tonight figured out the correlation between having emacs open and the freezing. Turning off assistive technologies appears to have cleared it up. For me it was alt-tabbing, invoking gnome-do, or hitting the system tray area.

I filed a bug against it here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/576646

[onyxrev (entp)]

Fixed in karmic, rather. Regession in Lucid both with emacs23 and emacs-snapshot.

[Gary Houston (ghouston)]

This also happens to me when right clicking on the Emacs title bar. The work around of disabling Assistive Technologies is good.