Comments on: Of Tabs and Performance

By: Thoughts on Palm and Jamie Zawinski « Ben Galbraith’s Blog

Thoughts on Palm and Jamie Zawinski « Ben Galbraith’s Blog — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:26:53 +0000

[...] legend Jamie Zawinski, one of the driving forces behind the release of the Mozilla source code and someone we’ve talked about in recent months in another [...]

By: The web platform – and the future of browsers | JAOO Community Blog

The web platform – and the future of browsers | JAOO Community Blog — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:34:22 +0000

[...] to Ben and Dion it hadn’t been the day before. Fortunately Ben later found the reason and blogged about it. And the culprit was the tab character and how it is supported in Bespin. In his blog post Ben [...]

By: Bespin Community Update; Tabs, Editor Component, Syntax Checker, Quick Open, and more | about ICT

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:35:33 +0000

[...] to be aware that there is a new CursorManager that handles some of the heavy lifting for you. Ben wrote all about it and how we found a performance bug with it on [...]

By: endolith

endolith — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:54:23 +0000

I’d say the character itself should be drawn in a subtle dark color, but that’s just the way other editors work.

By: Ben Galbraith

Ben Galbraith — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:47:47 +0000

@endolith: Absolutely, we’re not done with implementation yet. A tab character should be painted and the background should be subtly different. Or something.

By: endolith

endolith — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:32:15 +0000

Shouldn’t these characters be visible (in a faint color), so you can tell them apart?

By: Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Bespin Community Update; Tabs, Editor Component, Syntax Checker, Quick Open, and more

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:44:52 +0000

[...] to be aware that there is a new CursorManager that handles some of the heavy lifting for you. Ben wrote all about it and how we found a performance bug with it on [...]

By: Real Tab Support in Bespin « Gordon P. Hemsley

Real Tab Support in Bespin « Gordon P. Hemsley — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:18:08 +0000

[...] of Ben Galbraith (bgalbraith). Discussion on this issue has ensued in many places, including on Ben’s blog (in which he indirectly called me a weird hippie), as well as in at least two topics on the Google [...]

By: Ben Galbraith

Ben Galbraith — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:52:21 +0000

@Mark Kawakami: You and I think alike, my friend. The initial implementation for tabs just replaced them with a constant number of spaces–and then I realized afterwards, like you, that tabs don’t work that way.

By: Mark Kawakami

Mark Kawakami — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:40:26 +0000

Actually, you have to forget what I said. I just realized tabs don’t work that way. Consider these two lines:

AA{tab}
{tab}AA

… the tab itself isn’t equal to four spaces, the tab-stop is. So in the first line, the line length is four characters, and in the second, it’s six characters. Looking at your code, you obviously have figured this out already. The truth is, I don’t think you have any reasonable option but to measure character by character and store that length in pixels with the line or draw the line offscreen, measure it and store that length. Either way, I don’t see anyway to increase performance without either abandoning proportional horizontal scrolling or reducing how often you measure each line. The good news is that if you go the hard way and do offscreen measurement, you’ve solved the same problem for proportional fonts.