[plt-scheme] excessive refresh

At Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:20:16 -0400, Dave Herman wrote:
> In DrScheme, navigating through my code causes the entire editor screen 
> to refresh in order to redraw the paren highlighting, rather than 
> refreshing just the affected regions. When I *insert* parens, it 
> actually flashes multiple times.

The latest in SVN should be better.

At Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:26:44 -0500, "Robby Findler" wrote:
> FWIW, Matthew and I know about the issue but just haven't found time
> to fix it. The problem is specific to multi-line paren highlighting
> (or other multi-line highlighting, but parenthesis highlighting is the
> easiest to make it happen). The problem is that the interface
> presented to the Scheme code for redrawing editors is fairly coarse
> grained when you want to draw outside inside the editor canvas's
> graphical region, but to the right of the widest line in the editor
> (the only thing you can do to reliably draw there is redraw the entire
> window).

Internally, `editor-canvas%' now uses the 'no-autoclear style of
`canvas%' to avoid erasing of the window. So, it still redraws the
whole canvas, but you shouldn't see it because the redrawn image is
copied directly over the old one.


> On macs it is less visible because the drawing appears to be
> significantly more efficient, or maybe just the windows machines are
> slower, I don't konw. 

It's because Mac OS buffers window content, and by default it updates
each window's screen image only on GUI-event boundaries. So you don't
usually see the intermediate white state. (Also, under Mac OS,
`editor<%>' drawing relies on the OS-implemented buffer instead of
using its own buffer.)

Mac OS updating even seems to clean up refresh for Windows programs
running under Parallels, which is partly why I didn't understand how
bad the problem was.


Matthew