Re: [Texmacs-dev] address@hidden: Bug#189498: texmacs: redrawing hurts my eyes]

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> Subject: Bug#189498: texmacs: redrawing hurts my eyes
> From: Francois-Rene Rideau <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 13:27:11 +0200
>
> Package: texmacs
> Version: 1.0.1.9-1
> Severity: wishlist
>
> TeXmacs redraws in real-time, with various blinking effects,
> particularly due to its starting drawing from a black background,
> then pasting black-on-white text (thus, dominated by white color) on top.
> If the default background was white, it would blink less.

No, its default background is precisely the background color.

As to the blinking, we have put significant effort in making
things as good as possible. The problem is that TeX fonts
are long to draw, so one has to choose between several
bad options: wait until the entire window has been redawn
before displaying or progressively update while redrawing.
The first option is bad, because the user does not notice
any change for a while and no information is available
at all when scrolling fast. The second option amounts to
a certain amount of blinking. Nevertheless, the text near
the cursor is redrawn first and quickly available.

> If drawing happened in a side buffer that was blitted all at once when done,
> it would be even better.

So that is not true; we tried it.

> Actually, when resizing/etc., texmacs doesn't have much to show until it's
> done with lots of computations - thus it doesn't *feel* interactive,
> even though it's probably got better latency than e.g. mozilla.