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I've got an application running on Ubuntu. Whenever it fails to respond to system events (because threads deadlocked, or busy-looping), the windows gets greyed out. I understand this is useful in most situations.

The thing is, quite often the reason it is unresponsive is that I'm currently debugging it in gdb, looking at matrices of numbers and callstack, inspecting variables, etc...

In those situations, I want to see what was rendered on the window as it contain useful information and especially nice colors and graphs. Once greyed out, all the blue, red, green, etc... information is converted into useless grey.

Is there any system setting I can tweak so my unresponsive window doesn't get greyed out? Just displaying whatever was rendered last is good. Is a huge multi-person project, so I can't change the overall architecture.

(please don't answer anything about keeping the app responsive. I'm in gdb, and it will take more than a second)

The window manager used is "whatever is the default". More preceisely, I guess it's Compiz, over Gnome:

wmctrl -m Name: Compiz
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  • What window manager or terminal is involved? This is most likely a feature of the actual terminal emulator or of the window manager, or possibly the desktop system you are using. Commented Feb 6, 2020 at 16:51
  • I am sure you can turn this feature off, but I used ubuntu long time ago. I think you have to look for something like compiz-config window rules. Commented Feb 7, 2020 at 6:31

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Following @gabor.zed suggestion, I found this setting

http://wiki.compiz.org/GeneralOptions

Ping Delay

Windows that stop responding become greyed out after a certain amount of time passes. This setting tells Compiz how long to wait, in milliseconds.

Setting it to a huge value solves the issue. In order to change the setting, one needs to install:

sudo apt-get install compiz-plugins sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
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  • I can't set it longer than 30000 milliseconds, which is way too short for me. Did you ever find a more robust solution? Commented May 16, 2024 at 19:58

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