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From: John Morey <jmorey@tbi.com>
Subject: Re: scrollbars 
To: cthomp@xemacs.org
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 97 12:20:37 EST
Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
In-Reply-To: <199701081337.HAA09820@xemacs.cs.uiuc.edu>; from "Chuck Thompson" at Jan 08, 97 7:37 am
Mailer: Elm [revision: 70.85.2.1]

> 
>     John> I do not agree with this.  IMHO, the scroll bar size should
>     John> be based on the the pixel size of the display area of the
>     John> frame divided by the pixel size of the entire buffer (% of
>     John> buffer height displayed).
> 
> Actually, you're probably right.

Thanks.

> This is closer to the behavior of
> most GUI word processors as well.  There would be severe performance
> penalties for doing this though.

I would not do it then.

> XEmacs loses big time by continuing
> to use a basically character-only buffer with the formatting
> information glued on top.  There isn't any choice unless you want to
> break shitloads of old (and not so old) code.  To efficiently do this
> kind of layout you need them integrated.  You at least need things to
> be thought of in terms of pages.  But then you have a word processor
> not a text editor.
 
And XEmacs should stay, I feel, a text editor. 
> 
>     John> Again IMHO. The scroll bar should NOT change size as the
>     John> buffer is scrolled up and down which could be the case if
>     John> the scrool bar is based % of lines displayed or % of
>     John> characters displayed.
> 
> True but it would not be nearly so dramatic if it was line based as it
> is now.  There would at least be a degenerate case where it was
> constant (for people using a single font height).

I have to apologize here.  I have changed jobs since the last beta
cycle and have not been able to build any of the 19.17 betas.  So I
was still thinking that the scroll bar was % of character based which
drove me crazy.  I finaly have UNIX boxes again so I should be able
to build the current beta this weekend while praying for a WinNT port
of XEmace :)

> 			-Chuck
 
If it would be performance degrading to go % of displayable area
based then I would stay with % of lines displayed.  I do have to
say here that my use of XEmacs is 95% fixed, or near,  line size, 
it is my development environment on UNIX.  The other 5% of my XEmacs
usage is reading mail with VM.

--
| John Morey                       | E-mail: jmorey@tbi.com           |
| Software Architect               | Phone:  (770) 937-7895           |
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