Re: spastic response to keyboard input

On Wednesday 26 October 2005 00:16, Jeff Hill wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Thanks for Amaya. In many ways, it's a fine product.
>
> However, for what it's worth, from my perspective Amaya is let down by
> those vexing delays when one types characters or uses the backspace keys.

If you're working on a large document and you request to "generate backup 
files" (see Preferences), that could increase delays.

> I am always erasing characters that I don't intend to erase. Worse yet, 
there
> appears to be some kind of race condition manifested by several words just
> disappearing from the document - being overwritten by something that I am
> typing. 

Yesterday we found out a case where this occurs, perhaps it's the case you 
want to mention:
When setting the cursor at the end of a word and deleting characters with 
backspace, including the space before the word, the last character of the 
previous word is deleted.
This is due to a strange interference with the algorithm that repairs 
consecutive spaces as specified in HTML.
We're are fixing this problem.

> Furthermore, the scrolling in Amaya is so jerky that I often have 
> to try several times before I can get the browser to window the portion of
> the document that I need to work on.

Amaya formats only a partial view of the document. This is necessary to limit 
the reformatting when you insert characters.
So a scroll to another position can skip to a not already formatted position, 
and that explains the jerky response.

> Unfortunately, simple things like  
> keyboard response are often more important than an extensive feature set if
> one has to use the tool to produce product.
>
> Many things about Amaya appear to be really well thought out so I am
> surprised that it doesn't get the fundamental editor stuff right.
>
> PS: I am working on an SMP machine. I don't know if that might matters.

The most important is the performance of the OpenGL implementation as Amaya 
9.x are based on this technology.

> PPS: I have managed to put Amaya to useful work. See
>
> http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/base/R3-14/7-docs/CAref.html
>
> PPPS: I recently upgraded to Amaya 9.2.2 and I can say that the jerkky
> response is as bad as ever in that version although I'm not certain that
> the worse problem where several words get obkliterated is still present.
>
> Jeff

-- 
     Irène.
-----
Irène Vatton                     INRIA Rhône-Alpes
INRIA                               ZIRST
e-mail: Irene.Vatton@inria.fr       655 avenue de l'Europe
Tel.: +33 4 76 61 53 61             Montbonnot
Fax:  +33 4 76 61 52 07             38334 Saint Ismier Cedex - France

Received on Wednesday, 26 October 2005 14:28:56 UTC