Re: Scrollbar thumbs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:55:51 +0800
> From: Jason Rumney <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> The only solution seems to be to render the entire buffer offscreen
> in background, adjusting the scrollbar as we get more detailed
> information about the real contents of the buffer.  This is what
> word processors, web browsers and other complex applications do -
> you see the first page quite quickly, then you see the scroll bar
> growing as it renders the buffer in background.

Except that in Emacs, such rendering would be prohibitively expensive,
even for moderate size files, because we have display features that
those other word processors don't even dream of when displaying plain
text files, and those features are designed and implemented in a way
that is completely incompatible with rendering everything at once.

Doing the above will probably mean a complete redesign and rewrite of
the display engine.  And for what? for satisfying a few purists that
cannot live with marginally weird behavior of the scroll bar?