Re: Gtk scrollbar: thumb too short

[Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 21:15, Luc Teirlinck wrote:
> Jody Goldberg wrote:
> 
>    Gnumeric has received alot of bug reports on this score.  Some
>    people like the thumb to indicate the visible rows, others want it
>    to display the visible region.  We have received complaints both
>    ways.  My preference is for the visible region to provide some
>    feedback that there is hidden content.
> 
> Both the native scrollbar and the default (no options to configure)
> Xaw3d scroll bars seem to display the "visible region" (if I
> understand correctly) and do so, in my judgment, in an accurate way.
> One can have all kinds of opinions about other behavior being or not
> being preferable, but I would not use the term "whacky" for the
> present behavior.
> 
> Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
>    (Presumably, if you have a large chunks of hidden text anywhere in
>    your document, the scrollbar will go whacky.)
> 
> Is this a more than a mere "presumption"?
> 
> and:
> 
>    By "go whacky", I didn't mean the problem with dragging off the
>    end, but simply that a character-based scrollbar is going to
>    inherently act in a confusing matter, especially in the
>    presence of invisible text.
> 
> Maybe it "theoretically ought to" inherently act in a confusing
> matter, but somehow I do not see it actually happen.  (Except for the
> thumb size problem, which does not occur for the native scrollbar.)
> Of course, as is clear from Jody's message, one person's "expected
> behavior" is going to be another person's confusion and vice versa.

A) In case it wasn't clear, I am not a Emacs hacker, I am a GTK+ hacker

B) It would be a mistake that assume that anything I say about emacs
   is informed by more than (many thousands of hours of) casual 
   end user use plus theoretical considerations.

C) My main point was that the effect of invisible text on locating the
   end scroll position of the buffer should be roughly the same as
   the effect of it on computing the correct scrollbar size.

   Stefan Monnier seemed to think that invisible text would make
   computing the end scroll position of the scrollbar very hard. 
   That implied to me that Emacs computed scrollbars based on total 
   characters not visible characters; but I didn't research the
   point.

Regards,
                                        Owen