Re: cursor blinking problem

From: Joaquín Cuenca Abela (cuenca@pacaterie.u-psud.fr)
Date: Fri Aug 02 2002 - 14:33:08 EDT

  • Next message: Dom Lachowicz: "Commit: GTK2 pixbuf loader plugin"

    On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 20:19, Patrick Lam wrote:
    > On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 02:34:05PM +0100, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
    > >
    > > We have got a problem in the mechanism that blinks the cursor. The
    > > blinking is done via a timer and if we happen to be in another timer
    > > context, the auto-update gets blocked until the timer-triggered code
    > > finishes execution, and so the cursor does not blink.
    > >
    > > A current example of this is the background spell checker. To avoid
    > > the cursor disappearing while doing the background checking, on
    > > entry into fl_BlockLayout::checkSpelling() we flick the cursor off and
    > > then flick it on again just before we leave. This results in erratic
    > > blinking since the interval of the blink is dictated by the time it takes
    > > to spellcheck the current block, which is considerable for long
    > > blocks and virtually null for short blocks (load a reasonably long
    > > document, say 50 pages, and watch the behaviour of the cursor
    > > immediately after the loading of the document finishes).
    > >
    > > Now, I could improve the code in fl_BlockLayout::checkSpelling() so
    > > that it does not flick the cursor more often than every 500 ms, but
    > > that seems like treating the symptoms, not the problem. It would
    > > seem to me that the proper solution would be to have the cursor-
    > > blinking timer running in a separate thread, so that it does not get
    > > blocked by other timer events in the main thead. This way we could
    > > remove all the cursor-handling stuff from the spellchecking code,
    > > and would not need to worry about the cursor if/when in the future
    > > we implement other timer-driven stuff.
    >
    > Sounds good. More specifically, the fv_Cursor class should have a
    > lock and a boolean (which is protected by the lock) indicating whether
    > the cursor is on or off. The fv_Cursor class should also have a thread
    > with a timer; its only purpose in life is to set the boolean every 500ms.
    >
    > We don't strictly need an fv_Cursor class, we just need a bool 'n' lock

    yeah, you can still work in C...

    btw, I don't get your lock business. What is your lock locking?

    The only sane thing that it can lock (if we're speaking of a thread
    lock) is the period between when the cursor starts to hide/show and when
    the cursor ends to disapear hide/show. The "lock" that I mentioned in
    my last email has nothing to do with that, it was just a "construction
    is acquire" kind of object (like my XftFaceLocker).

    How can foreign code show or hide the cursor in your scheme?

    Start replying these questions in a sane way, and you end with Mike code

    Cheers,

    -- 
    Joaquín Cuenca Abela
    cuenca@pacaterie.u-psud.fr
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Aug 02 2002 - 14:39:15 EDT