Strange problems with (text) widget (and redraw?) under Tk 8.6 on MacOS X

Torsten Berg

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Jul 26, 2011, 4:55:19 PM7/26/11

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Hi, has anybody else seen this?

I am using tablelist_tile (version 5.3.1, which is based on using the text widget) and under MacOS X (version 10.6.8) and using Tk 8.6 (from fossil trunk) I see strange things happen in my app, that I do not see in Tk 8.5 so I assume this might be a Cocoa issue.

Sometimes, and I cannot reliably reproduce this, there are cell values in my tablelist tables, that are not shown. I can get them on the console using [$table get ...] and then see the values but I do not see them in the widget. (Using Tk 8.5 I see all cell values in the widget).

When I resize the window the update is veeery slow, and the vertical separator lines in the table get doubled or placed in wrong places. When using the green MacOS X button to maximise the window, the redraw is also not finished, resulting in a partly redrawn table, until I move the cursor into the widget, after which the redraw is completed.

But also then, other parts of the app do not get redrawn properly. See these screenshots:

http://tcl.typoscriptics.de/misc/before.tiff

Here the tablelist on the right is shown after pressing the maximise button, you see the original size of the table as an artefact inside the larger table. You also see artefacts in the lists on the left and in the middle.

http://tcl.typoscriptics.de/misc/after.tiff

After moving the cursor into the right table, it gets rectified, while the widgets left and middle still have problems.

It seems to me to be related to some updating of the widgets in general and affect different parts of my app. I cannot track it down, I get no error messages, it is just strange. Anyone else having seen this?
Torsten

Kevin Walzer

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Jul 26, 2011, 9:50:56 PM7/26/11

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I've seen this in various contexts, and unfortunately I don't have a
clear idea what the solution is.

--Kevin

--
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com

Torsten Berg

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Jul 30, 2011, 4:23:56 PM7/30/11

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Hi,

Csaba Nemethi, the author if tablelist sent some comments on this to me. Citing him here:

--- snip ---

On my Mac I have Tcl/Tk 8.5.7 (bundled with OS X 10.6.8), ActiveTcl 8.5.8, 8.5.9, and the latest ActiveTcl 8.6 beta. While testing the Tablelist 5.3 release candidate, I experienced similar problems when using ActiveTcl 8.6 beta. The other above-mentioned Tcl/Tk versions seemed to work as expected. It took me pretty long to find some workarounds for the redraw problem, and after incorporating them into the Tablelist code, the tests no longer exhibited that strange behavior.

It would be interesting (and maybe helpful) to know whether your application behaves as expected (or at least significantly better) when run with ActiveTcl 8.6 beta rather than a self-built Tk 8.6 from the fossil trunk.

Also, I am not quite sure whether this is a Cocoa issue, because from the above-mentioned Tk versions only ActiveTcl 8.5.8 is Carbon-based. For me it looks like Tk 8.6 for the Mac has some mysterious bugs that were not present in the earlier versions.

--- snip ---

So I went and tried ActiveTcl 8.6 beta but did not find a difference, not in the redraw mystery and not in the other issues I mentioned. Sorry ...

Torsten