Re: [gtk-list] Re: gtktext

[Peter Mattis <petm scam XCF Berkeley EDU>]

Arun Sharma writes:
>I think Josh MacDonald wrote the widget and the last time I checked
>with him, he said, he couldn't work on it for a couple of months.

I think it would be really cool if Josh could write up some informal
documentation on how the text widget is supposed to work
internally. It does alot of things right. Apparently Josh borrowed the
idea for the gap buffer from emacs so it works well with large
text. I've seen text insertion working pretty good at various times. I
think the only items left on his list of things todo were horizontal
scrolling, selections and fixing text insertion and deletion. That may
sound like a lot, but getting the text display engine to the point its
at where it rarely needs to use the entire buffer of text to display
the fraction of text seen on the screen is a lot of work. That is, its
a lot easier to write a display engine which works in time proportional
to the number of lines of text in your buffer vs a display engine
which works in time proportional to the number of lines of text on the
screen.

Peter