Odd behaviour with Oxygen on Wayland

[martindholmes]

Hi Radu,

As we've said above, although I originally suspected this was linked to Wayland, it is not; it occurs equally with X. We also have regular reports from our RAs working on Windows and Mac that they're seeing the same problem.

Also, the way you characterize the problem is not exactly the way it happens. It goes like this:

Control + F or Find in Files to bring up one of the find dialogs.
Enter something in the dialog.
Do the search.
Use the mouse to open one of the search results.
Start typing and discover that your keyboard focus is in a completely different application.
Alt+Tab around all your open apps until eventually the keyboard focus lands back in Oxygen.

I also once believed that dual monitors might have a role to play, since almost all of our teams are working that way. However, I've switched my dual monitors for a single wide monitor at home, and I still see the problem.

I believe that what you're seeing on the Mac may be exactly the same thing, but we have typically dismissed the find dialog by the time we hit the missing focus problem.

I've mentioned it to other people in passing over the last few months, and many of them also report experiencing it, but just put it down to Oxygen being an ill-behaved application that you have to wrestle with. I don't think that's a reputation you should embrace, frankly. I think you could reproduce this if you cared to, and you could then fix it; you even seem to have some idea of what might be causing it. Please don't write us off just because we're (mainly) Linux users; that's not a small community in the world of XML

[Radu]

Hello Martin,
Great, I'll report back after we manage to test this with a similar configuration, thanks for the details.
My Mac OS Find/Replace dialog does not seem related to the one you detailed, in my case after Ctrl-F was pressed the focus sometimes remained in the Oxygen editor area instead of going to the dialog, but I just needed to click the Find/Replace dialog to give focus to it. So I did not experience this problem of the focus moving to another application, but remaining in the Oxygen edited document instead of moving to the find replace dialog.
Regards,
Radu

[Radu]

Hi,

No luck so far reproducing the problem with Oxygen 27.1 installed on Ubuntu 24.04 with Wayland with the steps you gave us.

although I originally suspected this was linked to Wayland, it is not; it occurs equally with X. We also have regular reports from our RAs working on Windows and Mac that they're seeing the same problem.
Also, the way you characterize the problem is not exactly the way it happens. It goes like this:
Control + F or Find in Files to bring up one of the find dialogs.
Enter something in the dialog.
Do the search.
Use the mouse to open one of the search results.
Start typing and discover that your keyboard focus is in a completely different application.
Alt+Tab around all your open apps until eventually the keyboard focus lands back in Oxygen.

Double clicking a Find/Replace in Files result jumps as it should to the Oxygen editing area at the match, although there are applications opened besides Oxygen.

screenshot-2.png

Do you have any add-ons installed in Oxygen?


Regards,
Radu

[martindholmes]

Hi Radu,

It really seems like you're not reading what I wrote.

I initially reported this as possibly relating to Wayland because I started seeing it around the same time my desktop switched to Wayland, but we then switched two of our desktops back to X for some days to make sure, and discovered the problem has nothing to do with Wayland. That was just a coincidence.

This is NOT the behaviour: "Ctrl-F not sending the keyboard focus to the Find/Replace dialog." This is the behaviour:

Do a search (either inside the current document or across multiple documents). Find things. Dismiss the Find dialog by clicking the X in the corner. Double-click on one of the search results to bring up the document. Select text in the document (works fine, because mouse focus is there.) Try to type something -- magically the keyboard focus is now in a completely different application on your desktop, and until you switch away from Oxygen and switch back again, you can't get it back.

Saying you don't support Wayland is basically the same as saying you don't support Linux at this point. Here's what Google says about the current situation:

<quote>
Most major Linux distributions have switched to Wayland as the default display server, replacing the older X.Org system. The transition is largely complete for major desktop environments like GNOME and KDE Plasma, although users can usually still select an X.Org session as a fallback.

Wayland Rollout Status on Key Distributions.

Fedora: A pioneer in the transition, Fedora has used Wayland as the default for GNOME since version 25 (2016) and for Plasma since version 34 (2021). Fedora is actively moving towards dropping X11 support entirely in future releases, such as Fedora 43.
Ubuntu: After an initial rollout and a temporary reversal due to issues, Wayland has been the default again since Ubuntu 21.04. Ubuntu 25.10, a forthcoming release, is set to completely drop Xorg support in favor of Wayland for the default GNOME desktop.
Debian: Wayland has been the default session for the GNOME desktop environment in Debian since version 10 (Buster), released in 2019.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL): RHEL adopted Wayland as the default in version 8 (2019) and has since removed Xorg in RHEL 10.
</quote>

However, apart from this one infuriating bug (which is present in both X and Wayland), Oxygen works fine on Wayland. Since you offer Oxygen as a download for Linux, and you charge licensing fees for it on Linux, I think you should treat this bug as you treat any other bug: take it seriously, make a proper effort to reproduce it (or find some way that we can give you the info you need -- what happened to those log files I sent?), and fix it.

I'm just trying to download Oxygen 28 right now to see if something has magically fixed the bug, but the download mirror keeps timing out. When I get a copy I'll report back on whether I still see the problem.

[Radu]

Hello Martin,

Please see some remarks below:

This is NOT the behaviour: "Ctrl-F not sending the keyboard focus to the Find/Replace dialog." This is the behaviour:

You mentioned previously "Control + F or Find in Files to bring up one of the find dialogs." and we used the "Find in Files" approach, search for content, find matches, click on a match...

Do a search (either inside the current document or across multiple documents). Find things. Dismiss the Find dialog by clicking the X in the corner. Double-click on one of the search results to bring up the document. Select text in the document (works fine, because mouse focus is there.) Try to type something -- magically the keyboard focus is now in a completely different application on your desktop, and until you switch away from Oxygen and switch back again, you can't get it back.

We'll also try the Ctrl-F Find/Replace dialog approach, then probably use "Find all" in the dialog because this is they way in which you get a list of matches at the end of the document. Our test machine has an Ubuntu 24.04 installed on it.

Saying you don't support Wayland is basically the same as saying you don't support Linux at this point. Here's what Google says about the current situation:
However, apart from this one infuriating bug (which is present in both X and Wayland), Oxygen works fine on Wayland.

I added an internal issue to work more with Oxygen on Wayland and re-evaluate our statement that we do not support Wayland.

Since you offer Oxygen as a download for Linux, and you charge licensing fees for it on Linux

I see on our downloads page in the requirements section we mention:
https://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/do ... l?os=Linux

The version of Java bundled with Oxygen requires X.org. Wayland is not supported.

There might have been a previous problem involving our bundled Java VM and Wayland.

I think you should treat this bug as you treat any other bug: take it seriously, make a proper effort to reproduce it (or find some way that we can give you the info you need -- what happened to those log files I sent?), and fix it.

We treat this as a bug, the issue ID on which we are investigating is:
EXM-56501 Ubuntu 24.04: Click in find search results gives focus to last application
and the extra issue on which I requested to re-evaluate if we officially support Wayland:
EXM-56560 Support running Oxygen on Wayland

I looked at the log files, I did not find anything specific to the problem in it. One thing you need to understand is that we do not control all the ways in which a Java application interacts with the environment, I cannot for example write Java code to give focus to another application, this entire problem looks at least superficially beneath our control as Java developers, it looks like a problem between the Java VM and the Linux windowing system.

One more thing about the conversation you had with Adrian when you gave him the log, the description of the problem you gave seemed different than the one you gave on this thread, so I guess there are multiple focus problems which can appear in various ways, we'll test also the way you described in the email exchange:

I switched in the interface
from one file to another, then hit Control + F to bring up the search
dialog. The dialog did not appear, and when I started typing, the text
appeared in a bash terminal that was open on the same desktop. The mouse
cursor was still in Oxygen, but the keyboard input was all going into
the terminal.

I'm just trying to download Oxygen 28 right now to see if something has magically fixed the bug, but the download mirror keeps timing out. When I get a copy I'll report back on whether I still see the problem.

Yes, that would be interesting to know, in Oxygen 28 we upgraded the Java VM bundled with Oxygen to version 21 (OpenJDK Temurin 21).

Regards,
Radu

[martindholmes]

HI Radu,

I still see the same behaviour in Oxygen 28, unfortunately.

I think in the other description I gave, I believe the problem was actually the same; I had previously used the find dialog to get some results, then used the mouse to switch to a different document, and only then tried to use the keyboard to bring the find dialog up again; that failed because the keyboard focus had been lost following the previous search.

Generally speaking, any interaction with either of the Find dialogs seems to be able to cause the keyboard focus to migrate to another application (we think it's the last application that had focus before switching to Oxygen, but we're not sure). It doesn't happen 100% of the time we use a Find dialog, but it happens often enough (probably 50% of the time) that most of us have now developed mechanical responses to Alt-tab around the desktop until we get back to Oxygen again.

Cheers,
Martin

[Radu]

Hi Martin,

Thanks, I added the extra suggestions on the opened issue.
About not supporting Wayland officially with Oxygen, Java itself (versions older than 17) did not support Wayland so we could not state that we did if the Java bundled with Oxygen did not. The Java 21 now bundled with with Oxygen 28 officially supports Xwayland (so not natively Wayland) and we will state this probably on our downloads page.



Regards,
Radu

[Radu]

Hello Martin,

Unfortunately we cannot reproduce these problems on our side on the Ubuntu 24.04LTS Wayland virtual machine we are using with Oxygen 27.1.
We tried various scenarios similar to yours with various other applications opened along side Oxygen (Firefox, a command line), the focus (keyboard, mouse) remained in Oxygen after trying these scenarios you suggested.
We do not work with Ubuntu and Wayland daily though.

Regards,
Radu

[martindholmes]

Hi Radu,

I don't know what to suggest at this point, then, unless we go back to my trying to gather logs from when the issue happens. Should I use the same approach you described before to start logging, and then harvest the logs as soon as the issue happens? Did you see anything in the previous logs I sent?

Cheers,
Martin