tonyw wrote:You've highlighted a behaviour that is apparently deliberate from way back in the old days - if you specify Smart Refresh, then Intuition is supposed to handle the refresh (redraw) of the text and the application ignores it. The failure to show highlighted text is a side effect of that.
I have to disagree - to me, it's a misbehaviour for 4 reasons:
1. if Intuition is supposed to be in charge of the graphic refresh, it should never fail to do it when needed;
2. the option worked ever since and now it doesn't anymore;
3. the graphical problem should not affect functionality (i.e. copying still should have worked);
4. the fact that the problem doesn't appear on the current beta system (see post by javierdlr above).
Maybe some properly updated component(s) did not make it to the release package?
I've never really understood what is the benefit of Smart Refresh: selecting it never seemed to make any material difference that I could see. Why are you using Smart Refresh? Does it make a beneficial difference for you?
I don't have access to the sources of Intuition and, except for few basic notions, I don't even know AmigaOS from a programming POV, but, from the outside, my guess is this:
* if it's up to the application to preserve the graphics integrity, then it will perform all the graphic operations (which may be many and complex, especially in these days of eye-candiful looks) every single time, even when only a small area would actually need to be refreshed (f.ex., think of a corner of a window being removed from the front of the application window);
* on the other hand, if it's the OS that takes care of the refresh, updating the "corrupt" areas is just a matter of blitting the correct graphics (the additional cost is that a copy of the application window has to be made after a refresh).
Now, I don't know how smart the implementation is, I don't know if windows are buffered anyway (thus eliminating the additional cost of preserving the graphics) and I don't know if composition indirectly plays a role here (f.ex., it might enforce windows buffers and/or make the "maintenance" redrawing operations totally unnecessary), so my uneducated guess might be wrong, but I'd say that the smart refresh is advantageous in most of the cases (there wouldn't be an option for it, otherwise).
Massimo could probably tell us a lot about this
If it made any difference to me until now I can't say, having never used the OS without that option: now that I'm forced to go for the normal refresh (I use the shell massively), maybe I'll notice the difference.
