Re: is xdvi broken?

[Étienne Mollier <etienne.mollier@mailoo.org>]

Good Day,

Lurking at this thread, I discovered xdvi was installed on my
machine, probably pulled by some texlive dependencies.  I even
discovered a few old .dvi of mine, so give it a go out of
curiosity.  It has this look and feel typical from monochrome X
graphical interfaces released in the 80's.  Tasty !  :)

I havent had the occasion to have much issues with it, but I
didn't push testing up to run emacs, and produce documentation.

rlharris, on 2019-04-19 :
> After replacing the keyboard, it still appears that either
> xdvi is broken, or that there is a strange interaction between
> xdvi and xfce, or that it is xfce which is broken.

Perhaps you can check this by running your programs under
another desktop environment.  LXDE may, or may not, be to your
taste.  It is as light in weight as Xfce.  You can install the
package task-lxde-desktop to give it a go.

> Typical symptoms include:
>
> = Upon executing "latex <filename.tex>" xdvi does not display
> the revised text until a cursor key is pressed.
>
> = Sometimes the xdvi display shows a double image or a portion
> of one page written over an existing page.  At that point, I
> have found no method of recovery other than to restart the
> computer.

The program may become heavy on CPU due to necessary redraws
each time a window covers it.  Are you running your Xfce desktop
with or without the compositor ?  You should see this somewhere
around:

	System settings
	`-> Window manager tweaks
	    `-> Compositor (tab)
	        `-> Enable display compositing (checkbox)

I have no idea what changes this parameter will do to the
behaviour of discrepancies you observed, but I bet there will be
a change in the general feeling of the program.

Kind Regards,
-- 
Étienne Mollier <etienne.mollier@mailoo.org>