Re: proposing to improve the scroll bar

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hello Nathan,

Op 21-10-2021 om 17:57 schreef Nathan Lloyd:
> In plans to develop my C skills I would like to implement a more fine 
> scrollbar
> for nano.  I was thinking modifying the `void draw_scrollbar(void)` function 
> so
> when the scrollbar is drawn instead of simply applying a background colour to 
> the
> relevant character cells, it could print characters found in the Extended 
> ASCII
> table or even the UTF-8 table.

Which characters do you plan to use?  In the Extended ASCII character set I 
don't
see anything that might be useful for making a finer-grained scroll bar:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII

The Unicode block elements look promising, though:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements

But there is only an upper one-eighth and upper half block.  Where are the upper
one-quarter, upper three-eighth, and other three such blocks?  Something seems
to be missing.  :|

However, even when using just a full block and the two half blocks, one could
in theory still double the accuracy of the scroll bar.  But whether it is worth
it... I don't know.  Also, I doubt the block characters will be available in the
font of a Linux console, and for the feature to be acceptable, the scroll bar
must work both on a terminal emulator and on a Linux console (VT).

Benno

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