JetBrains tools add invisible windows

[andmichaelis]

Describe the bug

I'm on MacOS 11.2.3 (this was happening on Catalina too).

All of the JetBrains tools seem to add invisible windows over time. The longer they're open, the more of these invisible windows accrue. I suspect they're related to tooltips, intellisense, or search, but I'm not entirely sure. I tend to have these applications running for days or weeks at a time which might exacerbate the problem.

I recognize that this isn't specifically an issue with alt-tab, although it does make the alt-tab window a little bloated. Would it be possible to somehow filter these windows out?

Screenshots / video

I have three instances of WebStorm, one instance of DataGrip open:

Steps to reproduce the bug

1. Open WebStorm, DataGrip, RubyMine, IntelliJ, or other JetBrains tool.
2. Not sure. Do stuff or leave it running. Sorry this isn't more helpful. I haven't noticed the precise moment these artifacts show up in alt-tab.

[lwouis]

Thanks for reporting this issue! I use Jetbrains apps every day but haven't seen anything similar to what's in your screenshot!

Jetbrains apps are notorious for having nonsense "windows" all around. It stems from these apps being non-native cross-platform Java apps. They use the macOS primitive windows as building blocks for components that the users would not consider windows but dialogs, huds, etc.

There have been many tickets already (#562 #741 #456) about this and we have improved the situation a lot by hardcoding work arounds for these apps.

I'm not sure what else can be done at this point. Something we could try is to not show any window with subrole AXDialog. That may make some actual dialogs not show in AltTab, but maybe it's better than the current situation.

Which versions are you using? EAP versions? And which AltTab version? On which macOS version?

Also striking is that some windows on your screenshot don't have any visuals, yet they seem to have a non 0 size

[andmichaelis]

There have been many tickets already ...

I see, sorry for the duplicated ticket then! I should have searched first. My apologies.

Which versions are you using?

• JetBrains tools:
  • WebStorm 2020.3.3
  • DataGrip 2020.3.2
  • RubyMine 2020.3.2
• AltTab:
  • I just noticed I was on 6.17, and updated to 6.18.1 just now.
• MacOS:
  • 11.2.3

---

Interestingly, I just updated AltTab (and restarted it), and AltTab went from showing 5 of these "invisible jetbrains windows" to showing none. So, it was either:

• Updating AltTab from 6.17, or
• Restarting AltTab (something I never actually tried, lol)

I can continue to keep an eye out for this to see if there's an obvious culprit. I wish I knew more about macOS development to be able to pinpoint this a little better.

---

By the way, AltTab is one of the only reasons I can even withstand working on MacOS as a Windows native; thank you for creating it!

[lwouis]

@andmichaelis restarting AltTab fixes many issues since it clears all windows and the app has to find all open windows again on launch. It thus picks up a fresh set of correct windows.

I'm flagging this ticket as Big Sur since it happens on your macOS 11 machine, but not on my macOS 10.15 machine (same IntelliJ version). As I said above, the only workaround I can imagine is ignoring the AXDialog windows when the app is IntelliJ. Possibly it would help? It's hard to say since there is no guaranty that the windows on your screenshot are indeed of that subrole. I would need to debug to know that, but I can't since the issue doesn't happen on my system

[scorchio]

@lwouis Actually, the same issue happens regularly on my macOS 10.14.5 with IntelliJ IDEA 2021.1 (it happened on 2020 as well). Please let me know how I can help with debugging.

[lwouis]

From looking at the screenshot in #943 i got the idea of a new workaround: if the window is from a Jetbrains app, only display it if it's title is not the app name. I think it would work around the issues in all the past tickets, and would not filter out actual windows.

[lwouis]

I was able to reproduce the issue by spawning an auto-complete popup in AppCode with command-space. If the popup is big enough, it would show in AltTab as a window (since it's coded as such).

The workaround I suggested of filtering out windows from jetbrain apps without a title seems to work 👍

[nmiticlevi9]

After the latest release there are still some small problems with JetBrains... Steps to reproduce are...
You have this window that shows all the projects, and that one is visible in the AltTab menu

So now you open one of the projects, and that first project window is not visible in the AltTab as shown in the screenshot below

Now if you open another project (so now you have 2 projects open) both windows are shown in the AltTab.

So the problem is only when opening the first project from that JetBrains welcome screen.
This was working fine in the previous version - v6.21.2

[lwouis]

@nmiticlevi9 thanks a lot for reporting this issue! I think it's a regression caused by the new workaround. The workaround removes the non-windows discussed in this ticket, but also removed some windows that don't have a title which is apparently the case when you open an project which has no open tab. Let's follow-up the conversation in #948