Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] summary pane horozon scroll bar issue inethereal-0.10.6

["Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ulf Lamping said:

> As far as I remember, there is an autosize feature for the columns.
> Might we want to use that feature?

We stopped using it because it slowed down the process of reading in
captures:

    %svn log gtk/packet_list.c

        ...

    r9219 | guy | 2003-12-08 22:48:40 -0800 (Mon, 08 Dec 2003) | 6 lines

    Don't automatically size the columns - that's expensive in large
    captures, as it has to compute the width of an auto-resizing column in
    every row.  Just pick fixed widths for the columns (and tune the width
    of the "Protocol" column so that it's not narrower than the column
    title).

It also cleared up some cases where we weren't choosing the right column
size - and it means that, if we ever implement the packet list as a
"virtual" list where, instead of setting the column data at the time we
add a row to the packet list, we have the packet list code call a routine
to get the column data, we might be able to avoid generating the column
text at all until a row is displayed.  There might have been some other
problems it fixed as well.

> Or something like:
>
> gui.column.widths.No = 50
> gui.column.widths.Time = 100

...as long as the part of the name after "gui.column.widths" isn't just
the title the user gave it - otherwise, renaming the column means the
column width gets lost.