Subject: bug#36421: Having some text with face height > 1.0 causes scroll-step to be ignored

From: Juanma Barranquero <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Jun 2019 21:55:02 +0200

On Sat, Jun 29, 2019 at 9:37 AM Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Btw, why do you find recentering annoying?  It's the default Emacs way
> of bringing the next windowful of text into view together with some
> context.  Scrolling by just one line is sub-optimal because you don't
> see all of the context: the text below the last line is not visible.

I don't think there's any simple answer to that. I remember discussing this
in emacs-devel long ago (back when the new font backends where introduced
and line-by-line scrolling was unable to keep with typing <down>
repeatedly).

The answer, I suspect, is just that some of us are wired that way. You see
it as recentering bringing up new context, I see it as forcing my visual
cortex to scramble to go to the center of the window to re-locate the line
I was looking at. That's not only slower than just looking at new lines as
they appear at the bottom. but also quite uncomfortable.

The effect is so severe that, if Emacs only had recentering and
line-by-line scrolling were impossible, it would literally be unusable for
me. In fact, I think setting line-by-line scrolling was the very first
thing I set up in Emacs, back in 1998 when I started using it. Had not
found the options to do it, Emacs would've been gone from my computer at
once.

So count me as someone very grateful of the hard effort you put back then
to make it work efficiently.