Fast text display?

[Andrew Dalke]

Christopher Subich wrote:
> My first requirement is raw speed; none of what I'm doing is 
> processing-intensive, so Python itself shouldn't be a problem here.

There's raw speed and then there's raw speed.  Do you want to
display, say, a megacharacter/second?

> it's highly desirable to have very fast text updates (text 
> inserted only at the end)-- any slower than 20ms/line stretches 
> usability for fast-scrolling.

Ahh, that's 400 bytes per second.  That's pretty slow.

> The second requirement is that it support text coloration.

> The third requirement is cross-platform-osity

qtextedit has all of those.  See
  http://doc.trolltech.com/3.3/qtextedit.html

Looks like LogText mode is exactly what you want
 http://doc.trolltech.com/3.3/qtextedit.html#logtextmode

] Setting the text format to LogText puts the widget in a special mode
] which is optimized for very large texts. Editing, word wrap, and rich
] text support are disabled in this mode (the widget is explicitly made
] read-only). This allows the text to be stored in a different, more
] memory efficient manner.

 and

] By using tags it is possible to change the color, bold, italic and
] underline settings for a piece of text. 

Depending on what you want, curses talking to a terminal might be
a great fit.  That's how we did MUDs back in the old days.  :)

				Andrew
				dalke at dalkescientific.com