From xemacs-m  Wed Jan  8 07:37:22 1997
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To: John Morey <jmorey@tbi.com>
cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Re: scrollbars 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 07 Jan 1997 21:21:47 EST."
             <199701080224.UAA07509@xemacs.cs.uiuc.edu> 
Date: Wed, 08 Jan 1997 07:37:19 -0600
From: Chuck Thompson <cthomp@xemacs.org>

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



    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).



			-Chuck

