Submitted by LeftEccoForIQ on 2020/05/10 08:43
When I use the up and down arrow keys to navigate up and down items in the grid, this happens rather very slowly and when I hold down one of the arrow keys for a while and the keystrokes are buffered, it often happens that the cursor keeps on going up or down for a long time after I let go of the key. My hardware is above average, I would say, so I'm wondering if there is anything you could do to make this type of navigation more usable. Maybe a few milliseconds' delay could be implemented to check if the focus moves on to another item before updating the properties pane and whatever else IQ does under the hood when a new item receives focus?
 
Cheers!

Comments

Hi Left,
 
This is rather surprising as it is something I test and optimize as much as possible. I'll make a screencast to show how it usually performs.
 
My main PC is a 3 year old middle of the pack notebook (I5-6200U UHD graphics, not great, but it is all I can afford)
Scrolling is fast. Do these following tests to isolate the issue and report back if any help:
  1. Turn off wordwrap for all text columns
  2. Turn off Outline Styles and Labels
  3. Use the up / down arrow keys, not the ones on a possible number pad
  4. Reduce the IQ window size, in particular on a high DPI large monitor
  5. Reduce the number of columns or hide columns altogether
  6. Close Properties pane, Doc pane(s), Tags pane
  7. Run IQ as an administrator
 
Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer
 

LeftEccoForIQ

2020/05/10 13:27

In reply to by Pierre_Admin

Thanks so much for the extensive list of relevant factors!
 
After reaching number 2, I had a flash of inspiration: I re-enabled the 'Highlight focused cell' setting in Grid Options and voila, everything is super smooth again. Wow, the havoc that single setting has caused already! Yet, I forgive it and still love it as I feel it makes items much more readable and I work with different text colours a lot to reflect GTD contexts or urgency, and text colours only come out nicely with that setting disabled IMO. Hope it can be fixed.
 
If you decide to look at that code again, please bear mind that I've also been having trouble getting reliable results when trying to drag items around rather than do 'lasso ' style selection of several items with the mouse. Sometimes it seems to be just random which of the two effects a mouse drag has with highlight selected turned off (even when the cursor is clearly over some text rather than a blank area).
 
I know I'm probably the only person using that setting (to my enduring puzzlement) so I won't take it amiss if you decide to ignore these issues.
 
Cheers again.

Pierre_Admin

2020/05/10 14:28

In reply to by LeftEccoForIQ

[quote=LeftEccoForIQ]
I re-enabled the 'Highlight focused cell' setting in Grid Options and voila, everything is super smooth again.
[/quote]
Great ! But it is smooth with that setting off here, so perhaps experiment, it may be a combination of 2 or more settings
 
Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer
 

LeftEccoForIQ

2020/05/11 10:38

In reply to by Pierre_Admin

How strange!
 
Turns out there was a problem with my Autohotkey script interacting with IQ in this case. In the script, the Up and Down arrow keys are intercepted as hotkeys (i.e. not sent to the active window directly). When IQ is active, the hotkey doesn't usually do anything special so it just sends these keys as virtual keystrokes to IQ's window. Apparently, when 'highlight focused cell' is on, there isn't a problem, but when it's set to off, the response to these virtual keys is very sluggish. I was now able to fix it by using Autohotkey's ControlSend command to send the Up or Down keystroke directly to the active control, "Exontrol.G2antt.WindowList1" rather than to the main IQ window (AHK commands SendInput or SendEvent). In this way, the sluggishness with 'highlight off' has disappeared.
 
In fact, I have had problems with other virtual keystrokes not being accepted at all by other parts of IQ's UI. Now I think I'll be able to fix those problems by always using ControlSend to the active / intended control instead.
 
Sorry for wasting your time!