Re: Tooltips on w32 slow and strange

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org> writes:

> Miles Bader <snogglethorpe@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 22:28:19 +0200, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>>> > "Emacs Frame" tooltips seems to work really well in X11; why not just
>>> > make them work well in Windows too?
>>> 
>>> FWIW, I use Emacs on Windows XP and never saw any special slowness
>>> of the Emacs tooltips.
>>
>> Might it be simply that Windows is very slow in window-creation (it
>> is reputedly much slower to create new OS processes than other
>> OSes) and the original poster has a very slow machine?
>
> I think any slowness to create windows would not be perceptable, as
> it would just mean a slightly longer delay before the tooltip pops
> up. The perceived slowness I think is the delay between window
> creation and drawing its contents. We might be able to hide the
> tooltip window until it is completely drawn so the user does not see
> this.

Uh, disagree.  The really disturbing effect of a tooltip popup is when
you type keys and Emacs basically appears to freeze without
explanation until the Windows pops up.  Once we start working on a
tooltip, response is gone until we finished the tooltip.  So it is
essential that we do the tooltip in the fastest possible way.  Double
buffering not only makes the operation slower, it also removes the
possibility of guessing just why the machine does not react
immediately.

> But the other problem of focus changing when tooltips pop up is more
> urgent, I think.

That too...

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum