#92 cursor blinking speed

[Clay S]

ability to set the cursor blink speed higher than 500 ms its too fast

[ollydbg]

Yes, I also think it was too fast.

[Teodor Petrov]

ollydbg: Would you do it?

[ollydbg]

I extended to 1500ms, but I see the caret does not blink correctly compared with Windows native notepad.exe. Maybe, it is a scintilla bug.

src/src/resources/editor_configuration.xrc | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/src/src/resources/editor_configuration.xrc b/src/src/resources/editor_configuration.xrc
index 3db3e60..510b516 100644
--- a/src/src/resources/editor_configuration.xrc
+++ b/src/src/resources/editor_configuration.xrc
@@ -874,7 +874,7 @@
                                                <object class="sizeritem">
                                                    <object class="wxSlider" name="slCaretPeriod">
                                                        <value>500</value>
-                                                       <max>500</max>
+                                                       <max>1500</max>
                                                        <style>wxSL_LABELS|wxSL_TOP</style>
                                                    </object>
                                                    <flag>wxEXPAND|wxALIGN_LEFT|wxALIGN_TOP</flag>

[ollydbg]

This is patch can be abandoned, since it doesn't solve the core issue, my later patch should fix the issue.

[ollydbg]

I also test the windows version of SciTE, if I change the caret.period=1000 (in SciTEGlobal.properties), it also blink correctly, so it is a bug in wxScintilla or in our cbEditor.

[Teodor Petrov]

Probably it is wxscintilla related bug. If you have time it will be best if you can test the same thing in wxstc.

[ollydbg]

When reading and debugging the code, I see the multiply timers were introduced in the merge of the Scintilla 3.5.0 branch.
I see the multiply timers (wxTimer* timers[tickDwell+1];) are conflict with the wxSCITimer, this is the only usage of SCITimer, do we need them?
Or, shall we need the multiply timers here?

void ScintillaWX::SetTicking(bool on) {
    wxSCITimer* sciTimer;
    if (timer.ticking != on) {
        timer.ticking = on;
        if (timer.ticking) {
            sciTimer = new wxSCITimer(this);
            sciTimer->Start(timer.tickSize);
            timer.tickerID = sciTimer;
        } else {
            sciTimer = (wxSCITimer*)timer.tickerID;
            sciTimer->Stop();
            delete sciTimer;
            timer.tickerID = 0;
        }
    }
    timer.ticksToWait = caret.period;
}

Here is the patch to fix this issue, it works fine here under my Windows XP.

 src/sdk/wxscintilla/src/ScintillaWX.cpp | 9 ++-------
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)

diff --git a/src/sdk/wxscintilla/src/ScintillaWX.cpp b/src/sdk/wxscintilla/src/ScintillaWX.cpp
index da1538c..ef647e6 100644
--- a/src/sdk/wxscintilla/src/ScintillaWX.cpp
+++ b/src/sdk/wxscintilla/src/ScintillaWX.cpp
@@ -411,14 +411,9 @@ void ScintillaWX::SetTicking(bool on) {
     if (timer.ticking != on) {
         timer.ticking = on;
         if (timer.ticking) {
-            sciTimer = new wxSCITimer(this);
-            sciTimer->Start(timer.tickSize);
-            timer.tickerID = sciTimer;
+            FineTickerStart(tickCaret, caret.period, caret.period/10);
         } else {
-            sciTimer = (wxSCITimer*)timer.tickerID;
-            sciTimer->Stop();
-            delete sciTimer;
-            timer.tickerID = 0;
+            FineTickerCancel(tickCaret);
         }
     }
     timer.ticksToWait = caret.period;

Not sure other platform's result.

[Teodor Petrov]

I don't know, you should probably talk to the scintilla maintainers about this. Or see if wx guys have fix similar issue recently.

[ollydbg]

It is related to the wxWidgets port of the scintilla control, I looked at the wx trunk head, they don't have the multiply timers implementation in their wxScintilla(wxSTC), I think those improvements were done by Morten, so I wrote an email to Morten to ask his help.

[ollydbg]

Look at code of scintilla implementation for different platforms in scintilla's Mercurial code repo. I see that many platform use the multiply timers, but the SetTicking() is deprecated and never used any more, so I think we should not use this function call either.

void ScintillaWX::DoLoseFocus(){
    focusEvent = true;
    SetFocusState(false);
    focusEvent = false;
/* C::B begin */
    SetMouseCapture(false);
/* C::B end */
    DestroySystemCaret();
    SetTicking(false);
}

void ScintillaWX::DoGainFocus(){
    focusEvent = true;
    SetFocusState(true);
    focusEvent = false;
    DestroySystemCaret();
    CreateSystemCaret();
    SetTicking(true);
}

Now, I see that the SetFocusState() function already modify the caret status in ShowCaretAtCurrentPosition() and DropCaret().

void Editor::SetFocusState(bool focusState) {
    hasFocus = focusState;
    NotifyFocus(hasFocus);
    if (hasFocus) {
        ShowCaretAtCurrentPosition();
    } else {
        CancelModes();
        DropCaret();
    }
}

So, just comment out all the function call of SetTicking() in the ScintillaWX.cpp. It also works fine.

[Clay S]

thanks ollydbg, seemed like alot of work for something silly but it really does make a difference when your staring at it.

[ollydbg]

Commit the fix now.