Re: corba/gnorba/bonobo documentation + misc question/ideas

[Ronald de Man <deman win tue nl>]

On Mon, Aug 16, 1999 at 08:03:45PM +0100, James Green wrote:
> 
> Well, I use pixmap gtk+ themes all the time, together with the cvs version
> of e. You can compare with Windows9x in redraw times by saying that GTK is
> slower to the point of noticbly lagging behind. This is prolly due to the
> redrawing of the pixmaps, but it should be investigated for possible
> improvements.

Pixmap themes do a lot more work than Windows9x. This is not the fault
of GTK itself.

> 
> Another thing to notice though is that the loading of applications is
> often slower than in Windows, GMC takes about twice the time that Explorer
> does.

Really hard to compare. This depends on what is already running (both
gmc and explorer manage the root icons, so they are probably both
already running, and aren't really loaded), and it depends on the
directory that is going to be displayed. Your home directory under
Linux might contain hundreds of files, while windows only has to display
a small tree with C:, D:, etc.

A better thing to compare is for example freecell. But you would have
to try this on equally loaded machines, and you will probably also notice
that the 2nd time you load freecell, it will be faster (on both windows
and linux) because it's already in cache (I'm not really 100% sure
that windows will be faster the 2nd time, though).
In my experience, programs load quickly on any OS, as long as you have
enough free memory. If you have 64 meg on NT, and a few basic programs
running, then anything else will load slowly.

> 
> Finally, I've noticed that GTK does strange things:
> 
> 1. Sometimes if you click to bring up a menu and move over the *expected*
> location of the entry (i.e. before it's had time to actually draw the
> menu) and then click when you see it (lag of around a second?) GTK doesn't
> pick it up - you have to bring up the menu twice to have the entry pick up
> mouse events.

I can't reproduce this before I find a menu that doesn't display
instantly:)

> 
> 2. When an app such as GMC which draws many gtk areas/widgets loads, there
> is a noticable flicker effect as everything is added to the screen. Maybe
> it would be better to stop the window from being drawn until the display
> is internally finished and can be drawn from memory? This appear to be the
> way Explorer does it (at least, Explorer does have a noticable delay with
> no disk activity before instantly appearing on screen - presumably sorting
> out directory contents before appearing).

I agree that this happens a lot with gmc. It just redraws all icons a
lot, when this isn't strictly necessary. A solvable problem in gmc, and
not a fundamental Gnome/GTK problem (I don't notice flickering in
other programs).

> 
> Something for the Window Managers which I find really annoying - when I'm
> using GIMP, often windows will appear below the current mouse pointer
> location. By change this is often near the bottom of the screen, and
> dialogues will pop up with their bottom-halfs off the bottom of the
> screen. This is true though for many applications - if I could tell the wm
> to always initially display windows fully-on-screen, then be able to
> partially drag them off-screen later this would be a big usability
> improvement for me.

Yes, that is window manager related. Icewm does a good job, IMHO.

Ronald