I finally came up with a solution for the manic text area problem. I now reimplement the paint() method itself, calculate the tabs rectangle and repaint only the tabs area when the clipping rectangle is contained by the tabs area rectangle. After some tests I believe that to be a very effective way to handle the problem.

I’ll have to test it a bit longer before making a new release. I estimate that I’ll be able to release a new version by the end of the comming week.

Currently I’m working on a bugfix for Squareness Look & Feel. The problem that I try to fix is a fairly rare one but still annoying. It appears in applications that have a JTextArea (with a surrounding JScrollPane) that resides on a JPanel which is a tab component on a JTabbedPane.

Now when you type into that text area enough lines of text to make the vertical scrollbar show up and then type enough characters into the last line to make the horizontal scrollbar show up you can watch a show of indecision. Move your mouse cursor over the tabs of the tabbed pane and you will see how the text area grows a bit losing its scrollbars and again shrinks to regain its scrollbars. I have already succeeded in minimizing the number of repaints on the tabbed pane. But the show of indecision can still be watched each time the mouse cursor leaves one tab and enters another. So the text area isn’t as frantic as before but that’s still not really satisfactory.

I’ll try to make the text area a bit more decisive when returning it’s preferred size. I have still no concrete idea how to achieve that, but I’ll try very hard to find a way.