[pygtk] Large textview textbuffers files

[Funky Fred]

Hello all,
   The first question would be if there was a way of searching the mailing 
list archives - I couldn't find one.

But the real question I'm looking for is what the best way to go about 
handling the display of large files in gtk.TextViews. I googled around, and 
couldn't really find what I'm looking for. The basic idea is I have a 
gtk.Notebook, to which I add several tabs, each containing a Frame, 
containing a ScrollableWindow, containing a TextView. I dump content into 
each textview like so:
...
textBuf = gtk.TextBuffer()
buffer.set_text( fileBuffer ) #this contains the whole content of the file

textVw = gtk.TextView()
textVw.set_buffer( buf )
....

Now I have several files/tabs, and concievably will want a decent amount 
more. Right now I have buffers of size:  7b,  9b, 13b, 67b, 1640b, 100k, 
200k, 230k, 230k. And the memory usage shoots up a bit (not unexpected), but 
also the cpu is pretty much maxed out and the gui unresponsive (sort of 
unexpected). After initializing everything, it settles down after a bit (too 
long), but scrolling the window takes too long. I tried with smaller 
buffers, and everything is great. I'm on vmware on a 2.8 GHz machine without 
much else running & 512M allocated to the VM.

Even if I go to bare hardware, I want to be able to handle files of 1-1.5M, 
and not have the CPU pegged. (Actually, I don't care that much if the cpu is 
pegged, as long as the gui stays responsive :P)

So my first instinct would only to put what I can currently show in the 
textview in the buffer, and then add & delete to the buffer as the user 
scrolls up and down.

- Is this the right way to go about something like this, or am I off track?
- What's the easiest way to glue all this together?
  My basic idea is to use:
  (s,e) = gtk.TextView.window_to_buffer_coords() (would I use 
gtk.TEXT_WINDOW_WIDGET?)
  to get where I need to be in the buffer.
  textBuffer.delete( 0, s )
  textBuffer.insert( buf[prev_e:e],  prev_e, e )

- If the above is right, can I count on the the textBuffer coordinates 
mapping to the actual buffer indexes in the file? Or is another translation 
possible?

Thanks for any and all help!

-Stu

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