The workspace animation disappears when there is no window in the current workspace

[herry6548]

I found that if there is no window in the current workspace, the workspace animation will disappear when switching to another workspace. Is this intentional?

[dawsers]

When there is no window in a workspace, and you change focus to another workspace on the same output, the workspace is marked for deletion. While you use scroll, you will see there is this kind of "garbage collection" that prevents you from having more than one empty workspace per output, and it has to be the active one.

So, as soon as you decide to switch to another workspace in the same output, the old one loses focus. As it is empty, that marks it for deletion, so when testing to see if there needs to be an animation, there is no output assigned to the workspace, because it is being deleted.

This is a known fact.

[herry6548]

However, this visual inconsistency feels quite strange. On the linux desktops I have used that have animations(like hyprland niri mangowc gnome kde...etc), it seems that they never lose animations due to empty workspaces, which makes it look like a bug

[dawsers]

Well, it is not a bug if it is explained, documented, and doesn't reduce any functionality. scroll is a fork of sway, and sway doesn't support animations, so they can do certain optimizations like the one mentioned above (destroying the other workspace before the switch). However, I added the behavior you wanted in 9d86254. Now you will see the animation even if the origin workspace is empty.