Re: Emacs GTK scroll-bar flickering

[Jan D.]

> > When lines aren't available, Emacs uses characters instead.  But
> > every character added or deleted changes the thumb because the ratio
> > between total number characters in the file and the number of characters
> > shown changes.  Thus, Emacs updates the thumb a lot more than a
> > line based application.  When the scroll bar is bad at updating
> > for small changes like this, flicker occurs.
>
> What does that mean, "when lines aren't available"?

It means that the code that updates the scroll bar does not have that
information.


> Since scrolling is about vertical display, the only thing that counts is 
> the
> number of lines of text (or the number of pixels, in case of variable 
> height
> fonts and/or images).  The number of characters is irrelevant.

Yes, but this is not the way Emacs works.  It does not keep track of
the number of lines in a buffer unless you tell it to (line-number-mode).

        Jan D.