Sketchybar 2.24.0 blurs beyond bar radius & causes flickering

[NateyB]

I recently upgraded to 2.24.0 and now the blur_radius attribute now extends beyond the border of the bar; this behavior can cause flickering.

You can see an example of the extended blur_radius here. This is with blur_radius = 10:

(There does appear to be an upper limit to this effect. Setting blur_radius = 100 produces the same effect as blur_radius = 10.)

You can see here when blur_radius = 2:

When the blur radius is set to a large value (e.g. 10), sketchybar can cause screen shadow flickering with other windows. The flickering only occurs with some applications (e.g. it does not occur with ghostty and does occur with Firefox). You can see the flickering on Firefox here:

flickering.mov

Setting the blur radius to a low value fixes the issue—I think it is whether the blur effect itself actually touches the window bar, but I am not sure. Of course, this has the downside that the blur radius of the background of the bar is lesser as well.

[NateyB]

I just noticed that the blur effect takes up a fixed size no matter what the radius is set to. It's just that a larger radius makes it more noticeable. The flickering issue (or lack thereof) is still affected by the size of the blur radius, where a larger blur radius triggers more flickering.

[FelixKratz]

I think this is caused by the interaction of the window shadow and the blur.

sketchybar --bar blur_radius=50 shadow=off

gives no problems.

sketchybar --bar blur_radius=0 shadow=on

gives no problems. Only the combination

sketchybar --bar blur_radius=50 shadow=on

results in the reported artifacts. I will see if I can fix this.

[NateyB]

Yes, disabling shadow fixed the issue for me as well. Thanks for looking into it!