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I am running Arch Linux on a Dell XPS-13 9380 with the DWM window manager (which uses X11).

I recently started using an external monitor with my laptop. My issue is that when and only when the second display is active, my terminal emulator glitches when I type into it. Please note that this only affects the terminal emulator on my laptop display, NOT the external display. It is especially annoying when editing files in emacs or vim.

Here is the script that I run to activate the second display:

xrandr --output DP-1 --auto --left-of eDP-1 

The external dislay is DP-1, the integrated display is eDP-1.

By "glitches", I mean when a key is pressed that changes the display of the terminal, the text will flicker between the new change and the old change. If I am moving the cursor around with the arrow keys, the cursor will flicker around and sometimes settle in the wrong location. Note that the cursor is actually where it is supposed to be, it is just rendering improperly. This is purely a graphical issue.

I noticed the issue on the Alacritty and Kitty terminal emulators. These are both GPU accelerated emulators, so I tried URXVT and did not notice the same issues. Note: I do not believe that the Dell XPS-13 9380 has onboard graphics.

I am not sure if this is a firmware issue or an X11 issue.

Any ideas to get this to stop? I do not want to have to switch to another emulator.

UPDATE: It also glitches for ST, meaning that the problem likely has nothing to do with the fact that alacritty and kitty are GPU accelerated. I am not sure why urxvt works fine...

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It was an X11 problem. After installing the xf86-video-intel drivers (for the Intel UHD Graphics 620 chip. Consult the arch wiki to be sure). I added this to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d: 20-intel.conf:

Section "Device" Identifier "Intel Graphics" Driver "intel" Option "TripleBuffer" "true" Option "TearFree" "true" EndSection 

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