RFC: Kate Part + fixed / non-fixed fonts

[Lars Knoll]

> Hi,
> kate seem to have some speed probs, due of "lame" redraw at the moment. My
> plan to improve the whole drawing / calculation stuff would be to drop the
> support for non-fixed fonts, or at least enforce them to behave like
> "fixed" ones. (Which would make the most text-width, cursor-pos, view-pos,
> ... calculations VERY fast + easy)

Well, if you want BiDi support, it won't be that easy after all, so I don't 
know how much you would gain from it. A maybe better way to speed things up 
is to cache text width of chars. I don't know what you're doing, but 
qrichtext can handle large amounts of text reasonable fast, so it should be 
possible in kate aswell. Did you once try profiling to pin down the problems?

> But before I go to do that, I first want to get some feedback about the
> idea, in the areas:
>
> 1. would that kill any unicode support in the future ?

Not necessarily, but I would personally hate it as I don't like fixed fonts in 
anything else than a terminal.

> 2. would there be some other probs I don't thought of ?

See above.

Lars