Re: vertical scrollbar error on MS Windows

[Stephan Hennig]

Peter Tury schrieb:

> As far as I remember scrolling was always problematic (in the same
> way?) in W32 Emacses, so this is not a new bug?

No, it's a long standing bug.  I don't know if that was really the first
report, but I've first mentioned it on 2005-02-28 in
<URL:http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.pretest.bugs/6041>, after
watching it for a while.  The bug report remained without response.  A
few months later, on 2006-05-30, it got prominent attention
<URL:http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.pretest.bugs/12304> and after
Ralf Angeli gave detailed recipes to reproduce the bug(s) it was
discussed by several developers on emacs.devel
<URL:http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/55689>.  The result was
to fix it when there's time.

Again months later, on 2006-07-31, another bug report addressed that
issue, again without any response
<URL:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.pretest.bugs/13313>.  Now,
another six months later a new iteration of no-time-left.


> I hope you can regenerate the situation easily and fix this bug.

I hope so, too.  But unfortunately, given the fact that it's known for
nearly two years, I don't think the issue has high priority for the
developers.  If that's related to the fact that it's only present in the
Windows port, I don't know.

At this time, you can't tell a person from Windows island to have a look
at LaTeX & Emacs+AUCTeX.  He'd laugh at you and say: "It can't even
scroll your files without flickering.  I like <favourite> Office
better."  Well, I don't know what auditorium Emacs targets to.  But it's
obviously not (new) Windows users.  First impression failed.

The other problem I'm faced with is, this bug makes slowly migrating to
Emacs on Windows a pain.  I can't manage to learn all the keyboard
short-cuts at once and keep the mouse away, not even in the editor.
That's why I'm using SciTE as my regular editor, currently, and Emacs --
as long as scrolling is buggy -- only occasionally (which counteracts
memorizing short-cuts).

The recent thread "OT -- An extremely dumb curiosity question?" on
emacs.help is really interesting to read and shows a lot of tasks Emacs
can be the solution for.  But, using Emacs for mail, news or as a
calendar is no option for me as long as I can't navigate them with the
mouse in the migration phase.  In fact, I didn't try to set them up and
test for, yet.  But I can't spend that time for an application obviously
broken at a fundamental level (usability).

Personally, I'd categorize this bug as a show-stopper for a stable
release.  On the other hand, I don't know if Windows is an officially
supported platform.  Could someone please clarify that?  And what user
base does Emacs target to?

Sorry, for bothering this list with prose.  Peter's bug report has just
been an invitation to me to share experiences about Emacs on Windows.
Unfortunately, I did not manage to switch to Emacs within several years
of parallel installation.  For one that is interested in doing so, quite
a bad result.  But I'll keep watching the AUCTeX site for every new
Emacs binary.

Best regards,
Stephan Hennig