Hello Donal,


I come to you for some Tk advices.
As you may know, I'm writing an application to analyse protein multiple sequence alignment. Such alignments are made of hundreds of sequences of several thousands of characters long (BTW, DNA alignments, used for genoomes comparisons, are even bigger in length ...). To display them (with some annotations), we can't use the text widget because it is really too slow in scrolling when sequences are tagged. Instead, we are using the tktable widget as a workaround, but it is clearly not so pretty (such problems arise also in Java, displaying alignment is also done through a tktable like widget due to poor performance of the text one).

Diving into c.l.t, I found a post of John Ousterhout in 1998 who said about slow text widget scrolling : 
"Alas, very long lines are also slow in Tk text widgets, and your example above has one enormous line.  Tk uses a b-tree to represent the contents of the widget, but the leaves of the b-tree are lines (everything between two newline characters), so Tk has to do linear searches through lines to find anything.  It probably would have made sense to make the leaves of the tree smaller units than lines and perhaps some day we'll do this ..."
A lot of bioinformaticians would benefit of such a change.

I was wondering how much work this would represent to make this change ? I was thinking to take a student for some month (a "stage", training period during license or master degree) manage by me and a proper informatician tutor. Do you think it is a doable task , and how long could it take ? What would be the entry points to start (tkTextBTree.c I guess ??) ?

Many thanks for your help Donal !
luc