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Hi. I am curious to know what the "Force Smart Refresh" in the GUI preference actually does. I have this enabled, showed marked.

Is this feature important, and what does it do? Just wondering. I'm grateful for any help i can get.

I also tried to check earlier threats about this function, and it seems most people say Smart Refresh is the best choice, so i suppose my choice was right then.

I recommend leaving the Force Smart Refresh checkbox unticked.

Smart Refresh means that Intuition preserves and redraws window contents when (a part of) the window is covered by another window. Simple Refresh means that the contents is not preserved and the application must handle the refresh itself. Enabling the Force Smart Refresh option would mean that all windows use Smart Refresh regardless of application setting. This may not be ideal, and applications that require Simple Refresh (like the Shell) may not work as expected.

Personally, I got no clue why this setting is provided at all.

trixie wrote:I recommend leaving the Force Smart Refresh checkbox unticked.

Smart Refresh means that Intuition preserves and redraws window contents when (a part of) the window is covered by another window. Simple Refresh means that the contents is not preserved and the application must handle the refresh itself. Enabling the Force Smart Refresh option would mean that all windows use Smart Refresh regardless of application setting. This may not be ideal, and applications that require Simple Refresh (like the Shell) may not work as expected.

Personally, I got no clue why this setting is provided at all.

That's interesting, and it explains why Force Smart Refresh was left UNTICKED as default. I will change this back to being UNTICKED
immerdiately when i get home very soon. Thank you for letting me know. Yes, Shell was made to be opened with Simple Refresh.

However, a NEW Shell (which is said to be one of many things considered for AmigaOS 4.2) would probably be made to have a Smart Refresh window instead. It's highly possible, but as for now that would only be a speculation. It's interesting to have this in mind, and it surely makes sense. Thanks again for explaining in such a way it's easy to understand. I did ask about such things 6 years ago, but have forgotten many things since then. Trying to remember helps.

EDIT: YES, that did it! I have now UNTICKED the "Force Smart Refresh" checkbox in GUI, and this allowed the program Jack to be fully working and displaying again! Thanks, Trixie!

HKvalhe wrote:However, a NEW Shell (which is said to be one of many things considered for AmigaOS 4.2) would probably be made to have a Smart Refresh window instead.

Why? A console (not Shell, that's just the command processor behind it) handling its own refresh only needs to remember the textual representation it contains (plus possibly some formatting tags like colors and styles etc.) and re-print that, that's got to be much more efficient than Intuition having to remember the whole rendered bitmap and refreshing from that. And the console already knew how to do this refresh, no reason to dumb it down.

And the end result is the same.

Best regards,

Niels

nbache wrote:

HKvalhe wrote:However, a NEW Shell (which is said to be one of many things considered for AmigaOS 4.2) would probably be made to have a Smart Refresh window instead.

Why? A console (not Shell, that's just the command processor behind it) handling its own refresh only needs to remember the textual representation it contains (plus possibly some formatting tags like colors and styles etc.) and re-print that, that's got to be much more efficient than Intuition having to remember the whole rendered bitmap and refreshing from that. And the console already knew how to do this refresh, no reason to dumb it down.

And the end result is the same.

Best regards,

Niels

I suppose that is the nature of it and as long as it's the same console, right?

HKvalhe wrote:I suppose that is the nature of it and as long as it's the same console, right?

I'd say it goes for any console. A console is a text-based thing more or less by definition; it doesn't make much sense to have graphics in the contents part of a command line interface.

Best regards,

Niels

nbache wrote:

HKvalhe wrote:I suppose that is the nature of it and as long as it's the same console, right?

I'd say it goes for any console. A console is a text-based thing more or less by definition; it doesn't make much sense to have graphics in the contents part of a command line interface.

Best regards,

Niels

I see what you mean. Thank you for explaining.