Unfortunately I can't offer you any solutions, but since no one else has chimed in, I feel I should at least add what I can.
I believe I can reproduce this on my system. I installed Abiword from the stable repo on my machine. A Lenovo laptop running Stretch (amd64) with Intel HD 4600 graphics. I don't have a DE installed (like you) just a window manager on top of X (in my case JWM).
When I launch Abiword (3.0.2) the edit region shows a constant series of moving half-inch white bands. Reminds me of an old CRT with very slow refresh. These bands don't effect the menus or toolbars, just the page itself. I assume it has something to do with the document "refreshing". In fact, running Abiword with --gtk-debug=updates shows constant red flashing.
First thing to say: the
release notes for Abiword states the following:
"We recommend Gtk 3.20.x or earlier. There is a known issue with Gtk 3.22"
3.22.11 is packaged with Stretch, so that is probably the first thing to try. Personally I wasn't invested enough to attempt downgrading to an older version of gtk. Since I don't personally use Abiword.
Additionally, I get the following warnings when I run Abiword, which may be relevant:
There's a lot of bug reports and posts about flickering in recent Abiword versions 3.0.1 up. Some sound a bit different from what I'm seeing (ie needing to type before the flickering begins). Some are still open as of 3.0.2. Here's some possibly relevant posts:
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates ... ca183cdc57
> seems to indicate a known flickering issue that won't be fixed until 3.0.3
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1450574
> specifically notes version 3.0.2 additionally indicates sluggishness of the interface, which I did not experience.
https://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13791
> an upstream bug (open) for something similar
That's all I've got. Changing the GTK theme (as advised as a workaround in some cases) did not effect the issue for me. Ultimately I was unable to rectify the situation on my machine.
