[Urwid] Re: navigation speed

[Fabian Braennstroem]

Hi Ian,

* Ian Ward <ian at excess.org> wrote:
> Fabian Braennstroem wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> it's me again :-)
>> 
>> As I mentioned before, I would like to clone lfm to urwid
>> (at least I try) mainly because of its poor 'speed' on large
>> directories. Rebecca's 'filechooser' seems a lot faster
>> handling a lot of files... but testing more and more those
>> existing urwid examples, I get the feeling that the time I
>> gain in handling a lot of files I would lose in the
>> navigation. What I mean is, that going from one line to
>> another in a listbox takes some time, the navigation in
>> menus or in radiobutton groups seem pretty slow. 
>> 
>> Is it just my feeling or could that be a drawback of urwid?
>
> I haven't spent very much time optimizing Urwid yet.  That means there 
> is still a lot of "low-hanging fruit".  A change that would have a very 
> large impact is to make rendering the screen only render those widgets 
> that have changed since the last time the screen was rendered.  Right 
> now every visible widget is rendered on every screen update.
>
> There are also some big improvements that could be made by rewriting the 
> performance-critical sections of code in C.
>
> The patches I have against 0.9.7.1 are all performance related.  I think 
> I might focus on performance for the next release.
>
> For the moment you could try applying the latest patch I posted in the 
> "Unbearable slowness in UTF-8" thread:
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.urwid/350

Thanks! I will try the patch. Do you have any time schedule?
Would be nice to know :-)

Greetings!
 Fabian