Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!rutgers!mit-eddie!CS.WISC.EDU!dave
From: dave@CS.WISC.EDU (Dave Cohrs)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: smooth scrolling
Message-ID: <8908041447.AA03238@romano.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 4 Aug 89 14:47:28 GMT
Sender: daemon@eddie.MIT.EDU
Lines: 27

> Emacs attempts to optimize things by sending the smallest number of
> characters to the screen.

That's what you think.  You must not have seen my followup (maybe it
really didn't go out to the list).

I USE emacs under X11 (and I apologize for not making that obvious in my
original posting)!  Emacs doesn't use TERMCAP when running under X11.
It opens a raw window.  Because there's not TERMCAP, there's no way I
can fix the padding.  When running under X11, emacs doesn't calculate
costs for anything, so it thinks that scrolling is infinitely fast, or
some such stupid thing, while it should think that scrolling, even one
single line, is the slowest possible operation it could perform, given
the rule that it should send "the smallest number of characters to the
screen".  Perhaps in my ample free time :-) I will attempt to correct
this the right way, by fixing the code.

As Dale Worley pointed out, there needs to be a TERMCAP equivalent for
window systems, because different systems have different performance
characteristics.  A window system, even a version of X11, with backing
store and a graphics accelerator would probably scroll quickly.
Unforunately, the version I use has no backing store, and no graphics
accelerator.

Doesn't anyone else out there use emacs under X?

dave cohrs