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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Wireshark 0.99.7pre2 is now available

From: Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:17:21 -0800
Ulf Lamping wrote:
> Jim Young schrieb:
>> I think autoscroll behavior was changed (augmented?).
>>
>> My observation is that auto-scrolling now stops if you scroll UP in the 
>> packet summary pane.  You can restore auto-scrolling by simply scrolling 
>> to the bottom-most (i.e. most recent) item of the summary pane.
>>
>> You can also click on the "Go to first packet" and "Go to the last packet"
>> toolbar buttons to accomplish same.
>>   
> Ah, at least that explains what happens.

This was added by one of the guys here at CACE, and checked in in r22277. It's
intended to let you go back and look at any interesting traffic that might be
flying past during a live capture by simply grabbing the scroll bar. Modern
terminal programs have this behavior, e.g. when PuTTY's "Reset scrollback on
display activity" option is disabled.

> So two questions:
> 
> - should the autoscroll mode be disabled (e.g. displayed by the toolbar 
> icon) when scrolling is disabled? Having both a "visible" criteria 
> (autoscroll icon) and an "invisible" (position of scrollbar) sounds not 
> very intuitive to me - but I may be wrong here

How is the scrollbar position "invisible"? If you're at the bottom, then
autoscroll is enabled. If you're not, then autoscroll is disabled. At any rate,
the toolbar icon should reflect the autoscroll state. We'll work on a fix.

> - should "go to last packet" turn the autoscroll mode back on automatically?

If we want to be consistent with PuTTY, Terminal.app, gnome-terminal, and other
applications then the answer is "yes."