GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 331270
Moving tabs sometimes causes flickering
Last modified: 2006-03-11 18:26:16 UTC
That bug has been described on https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gedit/+bug/31434 "I noticed that when I have several documents opened at the same time, and I grab the tab of one of the documents to move it around, the tab sometimes "flicker"/hesitates, as you cross the boundary between two tabs. I tried to narrow it down, and found a way to reproduce the problem. I looks like the problems is related to the width of the tabs (hence the length of the file names) relative to each other: 1) create 3 new (empty) documents, and call them for example A.txt, AA.txt nad AAA.txt, so that the tabs will all be of a different length. 2) grab "A.txt", and sloolwy move it's tab : you normally see some flickering. 3) grab "AAA.txt" and do the same : there is no fickering. It seems that the flickering only occurs, if the tab that you are moving, is narrower/shorter than the tab you are trying to jump over so to speak. For example switching from A - (AA) - AAA to (AA) - A - AAA will cause no flicker, but switching to A - AAA - (AA) will."
Yes, this is a known issue. Unfortunately it's not easy to solve with our current implementation: to fix it you need access to GtkNotebook internals. Note that epiphany uses the same code and has the same issue, but it's not noticeable because all tabs have the same measure. There is ongoing work to code tabs drag and drop inside gtk itself, this should allow to solve the issue.
The chances of fixing this inside gedit are 0: even if it was possible (which I am not sure it is) it would require code changes too big for a stable release. In the next release cycle we'll simply use the gtk code and the bug will be fixed automatically. No point in keeping this open.