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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting to see that stopping a process causes visual artifacts when a window on top of it is moved. This is really odd, since it seems like applications should be able to affect each other in that way; that is, this not isolated so that a frozen window shows a snapshot of how it looked when it was sent the signal and nothing else?

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That depends on the window manager. The application state is not really affected, it just stops updating (redrawing its area). When another window moves away, the window manager asks the "underlying" application to update that area of the screen. It's dead, so the WM keeps displaying the last thing that was there, until something else happens in that spot.

On the other hand, compositing window managers will dedicate a separate buffer to each application, where they have exclusive access. That kind of a window manager would not have to ask the application to update anything - it would just take the image from the dedicated application's buffer and update the screen with it. Since the application's buffer can't be modified by anything else, it would have the last state of the application in it. That would in turn find its way to the screen. No glitches.

It also partially depends on how the client program has configured her windows, and how the X server handles related stuff.

Your sleep command could also iconify/minify the app's windows.

Good idea.

Just added -A and -S options that also minimize a window.

  -a  -  Do pause/resume active window.
  -A  -  Do pause/resume active window and minimize it.
  -s  -  Do pause/resume interactively selected window.
  -S  -  Do pause/resume interactively selected window and minimize it.

https://github.com/vermaden/scripts/commit/03591a138b14ceded...

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