Re: Another bug (was Emacs: 2 GTK hiccups)

[Jan D.]

> There are two different mouse wheel modes, depending on whether the 
> mouse is over the window, or over the GTK scroll bar. Especially 
> amusing is that over the scrollbar, there is a very original 
> behaviour: the first line of the window scrolls sideways! If the 
> buffer is not very big, the characters trickle in or out at the left 
> margin one by one. For bigger buffers, this happens a few characters 
> at a time, for every mouse-4 or mouse-5 event.
>
> But Lucid scrolling was also hairy. Especially in comint, I sometimes 
> got a display of an empty first line, even though it wasn't empty.

This happens on all Emacs versions, see the thread "Strange text 
scrolling with Emacs + GTK" in emacs-devel.

> > I've been trying to get the GTK scroll bars to behave for about nine 
> > months (off and on), but GTK really does not support a lot of 
> > different behaviours. The GTK people have said that they will not 
> > change GTK for the sake of Emacs in this regard, since the Emacs 
> > behaviour is so uncommon.
>
> It's true that it's uncommon, but it would be way cool for other apps 
> as well! For example in a browser, the last page will scroll only by 
> half on average. That means lost time scanning the whole screen to 
> find where I was. Doing a grey overlay that fades out, or an overlay 
> line where the window edge was, would be an alternative to the Emacs 
> way. But doing nothing is a *big* nuisance!

For now, the alternatives looks like either keep the current behaviour 
or remove GTK scroll bars.  I don't think a thing like this should hold 
up the release.  It is all very well talking about fancy behaviours, it 
is another to implement them, be it GTK or Emacs developers.  I am not 
sure this is interesting for gtk-devel, it is after all an Emacs policy 
to have a very uncommon behaviour.  We can't expect toolkits to change 
if there is no general benefit involved.  After all, one part of having 
toolkits is uniform behaviour across applications.

        Jan D.