[Qt-qml] QTextEdit vs TextEdit overall look and feel and responsiveness

[Gregory Schlomoff]

Greetings,

After commenting briefly about the responsiveness and general feeling
of QML TextEdit compared to QTextEdit, I made a quick demo project to
feature them side-by-side.

Here are some differences between the two:

1. The text is crisper on QTextEdit because it uses subpixel anti
aliasing whereas TextEdit doesn't (reported as QTBUG-16205)
2. It's hard to select the text in the TextEdit when it's inside the
Flickable. When the Flickable is disabled, the selection works well,
but then there is no scrolling
3. There is no system context menu on TextEdit to do things like copy
and paste. (Yet, using the keyboard accelerators Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, etc..
works)
4. There is no text beam cursor on the TextEdit. (There is a
discussion about mouse cursor shapes on QTBUG-10642)
5. It *seems* that the declarative view takes a bit longer to display
a character after a keypress, but that's hard to quantify.

Lastly, the behaviour of the blinking cursor on both QTextEdit and
TextEdit is different from the standard Windows behavior: on windows,
when you click on some text, the blinking cursor is always displayed
instantly. On Qt (both QTextEdit and TextEdit, when you click on some
text, if the cursor was in the "hidden" phase of it's blinking cycle,
you'll have to wait until the phase ends to actually see the cursor.
So clicking on text in Qt seems less responsive, since the blinking
cursor may not be displayed instantly.

Those may seem small things, but they tend to ruin the overall user
experience of writing text in QML. As we are working on an email
client, this is obviously an important aspect for us. I hope we can do
something to make this better.

Cheers,

greg
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: TextEdits.zip
Type: application/zip
Size: 3289 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.qt.nokia.com/pipermail/qt-qml/attachments/20110105/64fa80ca/attachment.zip