So I upgraded my arch to plasma from 6.3.4 to 6.4.4 a few months ago, spectacle was generally very stable for me to never give much thought, but one annoying thing that cropped up is spectacle now has a weird delay AFTER I take a screen shot (not before like the delay feature).
It works normally if I select rectangle area, the screen darkens, I select the area, hit enter, and then the delay. It used to be immediate to see spectacle reappear instantly with the resultant capture, but now there’s about a 5 second delay. While this doesn’t sound that bad, I do a LOT of tech writing and documentation, so at times I may end up taking a few dozen screen shots of something, which I did recently, and it was a bit maddening.
It also seems exacerbated if I select “Rectangle Area”, let the screen go dark, and then escape to cancel out back to spectacle (like the screen changed and I need to redo the shot), which takes 5 or more seconds at times to recover. When I’m doing this a lot, it feels like forever…
It’s odd, like something is busted and can’t find something else when it does it (dbus?). The interesting thing is tinkering with it after, such as starting spectacle from terminal hoping to catch some errors, I did a ps aux | grep spectacle, and noticed several instances running at the same time. Doing a killall -9 spectacle and restarting it from terminal seemed to fix the problem for a bit, but its still weird and annoying, and I’ve never seen it NOT do this weird delay until today since 6.4.4.
I can’t really see what’s happening when it does, there’s no log output in the journal, and can’t seem to force the behaviour to do so when restarting it with an strace to see what happens during the delay. There’s also no –debug or verbose or other option to debug it either to leave running normally.
I know now (as of today) to restart spectacle with a hard kill when it gets cranky seems to fix it, but I use spectacle a LOT and otherwise usually leave it running as an every day app before this. Maybe something the dev’s should look for if tinkering with spectacle in the future as it never did this in 6.3.5 or earlier, only since 6.4.4 I’m using currently.
At some point soon I’ll upgrade arch and land in 6.5.x and maybe gone, but I figured I’d mention it as its been bugging me since the last upgrade and wondering if anyone else has seen this or something weird just for me.