Xpad

Xpad control in top left corner of screen is promblematic

Asked by Dave Rove

I'm using Xpad 5.3.0 on Kubuntu 19.04. When Xpad is running, in the very top left-hand corner of the screen is an xpad control that I keep hitting by accident. It is invisible but overlaps the top of the "file" menu item in many fullscreen apps. If I left-click it by mistake, the xpads all disappear. If I right-click it by mistake, the xpad control menu appears. In order to actually invoke the "file" menu of a fullscreen app, I have to very carefully position the mouse in the lower half of the word "file" before clicking.

Is this a bug? Is it deliberate? If it's deliberate, it's very annoying and seemingly unnecessary, since the xpad controls are accessible by clicking on an actual xpad. Is there any way to disable this spurious control? It's not mentioned in the xpad documents that I can see.

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Dave Rove
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Dave Rove (daver1730) said : 		#1

Aaand I fixed it. After looking for all files related to xpad with "locate" and looking at xpad's configuration options again, I saw that there was a startup file ~/.config/autostart/xpad.desktop (presumably placed there if you configure it to startup on login) and I noticed xpad had a config setting to wait for the taskbar (which I had checked). Although xpad's icon appeared correctly in the taskbar, I wondered if it was *still* starting too early. If it tried to place a control on the taskbar before the desktop had properly started then it might well place a control in the screen's "zero" coordinates.

I replaced the "xpad" command in the desktop startup file with "(sleep 2;xpad;)&" to give it and extra 2 seconds and rebooted. The problem was gone. I rebooted a few more times to check that it really was that simple and the problem really had gone, and yes it had.

So there we are. It seems that there's still something a bit pathological with xpad's startup, but the problem is solved for me.

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Arthur Borsboom (arthurborsboom) said : 		#2

Hi Dave,

Good find.

To add to your solution, Xpad has a feature in its preferences to delay the startup.
Thanks for sharing your solution.

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Dave Rove (daver1730) said : 		#3

Ah, so there is. I missed that, presumably because it just says "Delay in seconds" and it's under the checkbox "Open a new empty pad", so it didn't click for me even though it was on the startup tab.

I presume that it's really difficult to autodetect if the KDE desktop is ready. A quick Google search shows that people have searched for solutions and found no direct answer that I can see.