Community

Hello,

For about as long as I can remember, and on various different computers, I've experienced scrolling problems with Textpad when trying to scroll within a text file using the scroll wheel on any number of Microsoft mice. There were a couple of posts here regarding this a couple of years ago, but neither of them is of much help.

When the scroll wheel settings are set to "scroll x lines at a time" in either Intellipoint or TweakUI in Windows 2000, Textpad seems to insist on smoothly scrolling the window when you use the mouse wheel. What's worse, the "scroll buffer" seems to fill faster than it can empty, which means that if you give the scroll wheel a little flick, you end up sitting there drumming your fingers, waiting for Textpad to finish scrolling the complete distance. If I scroll the wheel back and forth quickly, I've even been able to get the computer speaker to beep, indicating (I think) that some hardware buffer is full. However, if you're using the keyboard or if you grab the scrollbar with the mouse, there's no such lag effect. Textpad scrolls instantly.

Now, when the scroll wheel settings are set to "scroll one screen at a time" in either Intellipoint or TweakUI, Textpad works just fine. It scrolls exactly the number of screens you'd expect when you flick the mouse wheel, and it does it instantly. No laggy problems as described above.

Note that I've experienced this laggy problem when scrolling x lines at a time whether or not Intellipoint is installed, and regardless of what mouse is connected, or even whether it's USB or PS2. The problem persists regardless of the "smooth scrolling" setting in both TweakUI and Internet Explorer (I always leave these settings disabled anyway). Changing the "accelerated scrolling" setting in Intellipoint has no effect. I've tried different video cards, and different video card drivers. One other variable I've noticed (which seems to be isolated to the Nvidia TNT2 Model 64 video card), is that setting the colour depth to 32 bit makes the problem excruciating. Leaving it at 16 bit makes it less intolerable.

I've never seen this issue in any other text editor, or any other windows program that involves scrolling for that matter. I can't help but think that there must be something unique in how Textpad handles the scroll wheel event. Lately, I've found this annoying enough that I've very reluctantly switched to UltraEdit in the interim.

Is this a known bug, or is there some sort of workaround for this within Textpad or in the registry? Doesn't this drive hordes of people up the wall as they wait for their text file to finish scrolling x number of lines?

Here's my (current) system description, although the problem persists on all others that I've so far come across:

Athlon 700, 512 MB RAM, Windows 2000 SP3, built in TNT2 Model 64 video card driver, Microsoft Optical Wheel Mouse USB, Intellipoint 4.1, smooth scrolling disabled in TweakUI and IE, accelerated scrolling and scroll by 3 lines at a time enabled in Intellipoint, Textpad 4.6.2.

Phew, OK, got that out of my system. Thanks for any and all replies.

Cheers,

Martin

Martin,

TextPad uses the fastest scrolling API that Windows offers. This uses bit-block transfers, which make memory intensive demands of the display hardware, but that should only look slow with drivers which have to emulate that capability for defficient hardware. It's certainly not an effect I can see with my TNT2 Model 64 video card, at 32-bit color, so something is acting as a bottleneck on your system. Perhaps this is an issue with the Athlon 700.

Try adding TextPad to the list of programs on Mouse Properties/Wheel/Troubleshooter/Advanced.

Keith MacDonald
Helios Software Solutions

Keith & Martin -

I have also encountered the slow scrolling problem. I'm running Windows 2000 on a Dell Optiplex with 512M of memory. One thing I noticed - the problem only occurs at high screen resolution. At 1024x768, the scrolling works perfectly. As soon as I increase resolution past that point, the problem occurs. Not sure how many folks run resolutions at this level, but most of the guys (developers) I work with use 1280x1024. I tried the tip with the Intellimouse software to no avail.

Thanks,
Josh

bbadmin wrote:Martin,
(snip)
Perhaps this is an issue with the Athlon 700.

Try adding TextPad to the list of programs on Mouse Properties/Wheel/Troubleshooter/Advanced.

Keith MacDonald
Helios Software Solutions

Keith,

like I said before, I've seen this problem on a whole bunch of different systems, both Intel and AMD, so this isn't an issue with the Athlon 700. Like Josh, I tried adding Textpad to Mouse Properties/Wheel/Troubleshooter/Advanced, but that didn't do anything.

I've found that running at 1024x768 improves things somewhat, and decreasing colour depth to 16 bit improves things somewhat again, but the lag is still there, and it's still annoying. I think the changing of colour depth and resolution is something particular to this specific computer (drivers probably), since I haven't seen it on others, but again I have to stress that the scroll wheel is laggy - whether mildly or severely - on EVERY computer I've tried running Textpad on.

Martin

This is probably my biggest gripe with TextPad (I don't have too many). I don't understand why it is the only program on my machine that has a problem scrolling with the mouse wheel. For some unknown reason the scroll performed by the mouse wheel is "smooth" whereas the scroll performed by the scroll bar is not. I disabled smooth scrolling system wide via my registry, so I do not understand this behavior with mouse wheel scrolling.

Here is an easy way to demonstrate the behavior.
1. set the number of lines for mouse wheel scrolling to a large number (e.g. 100)
2. open a relatively long file in textpad
3. scroll the mouse wheel once.
4. watch the lines scroll until 100 lines have passed.
5. click on the scrollbar in between the slider and the end arrows
6. in this case the document simply 'jumps' ahead or back a page-length of lines.

It seems to me that when scrolling with the mouse wheel the page should "jump" the number of lines rather than "smooth" scrolling each line at a time. The current behavior is slow when scrolling large numbers of lines. I may not have the fastest graphics processor in the world, but no other application seems to have this difficulty so it would seem to me that TextPad is doing something differently.

Sorry for the rant Great program.

[EDIT]
BTW, I just tried setting the mouse wheel to scroll a page at a time and the "smooth scrolling" behavior is gone. Only problem is that I don't want to scroll a page at a time

dandersahn,

Yup, that's exactly my experience with Textpad (although I haven't tried 4.7.2 yet). Couldn't have said it any better. Surely there must be other people out there experiencing the same thing. What is it about our configs that we have in common? Maybe I always set some arcane option in all of my Textpad installs or all of my Windows installs, and that's what's causing the problem...

Martin

Don't know if this is relevant, but I've never had a problem on either machine I use TextPad on. Both have a Logitech mouse. Does everyone with a problem have a Microsoft mouse? Just a hunch...though I would be suprised. Though I like Logitech's mice better, I always thought that MS' drivers were better.

DrX

I have the problem with a Logitech mouse.

Mine's a Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical...