Re: Scrollbar thumbs

[David Kastrup]

"grischka" <address@hidden> writes:

>>> I guess it is just that these GUI toolkit people usually are trained
>>> to deliver good looking and pixel-precise artwork and in consequence
>>> might have some difficulties to imagine how it can be "pretty much
>>> impossibe" for some editor to know how many lines it is actually
>>> displaying (or anyway that such editor would still want to use their
>>> scrollbars).
>>
>> Emacs _does_ know how many lines it's displaying.
>>
>> What it doesn't know is how many lines are in the entire file, or
>> more precisely, the "height" of the entire file as rendered, which
>> essentially requires rendering the _entire thing_ (it can't be
>> calculated from logical number of lines because it depends on the
>> exact characters rendered).  That's a pretty nasty requirement for a
>> non-toy editor...
>
> The simple rule is: First do it right, then do it fast.  Try to make
> it work for small files and then you can still think about how to get
> equally good results with larger ones.

It is not an option to make Emacs unusable on large files for the sake
of the scrollbar idiosyncrasies of some toolkit.

-- 
David Kastrup