Re: NSTextView becomes temporarily unresponsive
Re: NSTextView becomes temporarily unresponsive
- Subject: Re: NSTextView becomes temporarily unresponsive
- From: David Swofford <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:15:46 -0400
On Jul 13, 2010, at 7:34 PM, Ross Carter wrote:
> I don't think it has anything to do with wrapping. AFAICT, layout is complete before the delay begins. I think this is a bug that you need to report. Maybe Doug or Aki can chime in with a solution.
Thanks for a very informative reply.
> Here are some things that I found:
>
> 1. The problem is indeed the hyphen characters. Replace all the - with + or _ and everything works fine.
Yes, I noticed this too.
> 2. The NSTypesetter method -endParagraph, and the NSLayoutManager delegate method textContainer:didCompleteLayout:.... both fire quickly, as they should. That's why I think layout is already over by the time the delay kicks in.
Good to know--I was starting to focus on the wrong thing.
> I don't know why -insertText: causes a call to -doubleClickAtIndex: after the insertion is complete
Yes, I mentioned my curiosity about that in the first post. It seems very odd.
> or why doubleClickAtIndex: takes so long to run. If you in fact double-click anywhere in the document, it runs instantly.
Yep. About half of the doubleClickAtIndex: time is in CFUniCharIsAMemberOf and a third is in CFStringGetCharacters. Why is all this being done?
One additional observation: If I substitute underscores for hyphens in various proportions of the document, it looks like the delay time scales roughly with the number of hyphens remaining. That suggests that the entire document is being scanned as the result of one keypress.
> 3. My app, Pagehand, handles the test file just fine. I've heavily subclassed all the components of the text system and I cannot tell what is fixing the problem.
Doug Davidson did suggest (offline) overriding doubleClickAtIndex:. I'm inexperienced in Cocoa and when I started looking at what it would take to subclass NSTextStorage and the prospect of doing this scares me.
> 4. As a workaround, could you use underscore characters instead of hyphens? I tried using en dash and got the same result as hyphens.
I suppose I could recommend this to users, but hyphens are a long-standing tradition. Funny, I also tried the en dash thinking that would "fix" it and was surprised when it didn't.
> 5. May I suggest that it might not be meaningful to present 70 thousand characters, comprising only ACTG and -, in one scrolling text view? Mightn't you present only a snippet at a time, rather than the entire sequence? Just a thought.
These lines are just the data matrix component of a larger file format looking something like this:
#NEXUS
begin data;
dimensions ntax=10 nchar=7234;
format datatype=dna;
matrix
species1 ACGTACGT....
species2 ACGTACGT....
species3 ACGTACGT....
;
end;
begin paup;
command...
another_command....
...
end;
Users want to edit things above and below the matrix. Typically, they don't even touch the matrix in my editor (it is typically output from some other program). So in that sense, this is not a big deal. But I don't want them to think the program has crashed if they do happen to type something in the matrix. And there are some users who actually like to "manually align" (insert and delete hyphen characters) in my editor, even though there are more appropriate tools for doing it. I don't let the lines wrap in my editor, and the current Carbon version of my app has a horizontal scroll bar that allows them to get to the very ends of the sequences, unlike most standard text editors (at least the ones that don't use NSTextView, which I was pleased to discover handles wide scrolling ranges automatically).
> Hope this helps.
It does! Thanks for your time.
Dave
--
David L. Swofford email@hidden
Center for Evolutionary Genomics
Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy
Box 90338
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708 USA
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