RichEdit weird behavior after adding tabs

[sentry07]

I've got a program that I've been converting to a tabbed interface. It uses a RichEdit control for showing a buffer of communications. I added the Tab control and have revamped the code fully to take advantage of creating tabs and all that fun stuff. Everything is working exactly how I planned except now I see two things happening: 1) As I move my mouse over the RichEdit control, my mouse flickers between the IBar cursor and the standard arrow cursor, and 2) I can't scroll in the RichEdit with my mousewheel anymore.

Allow me derail this post for one second. In Windows you have to click on a control before you can use your mousewheel to scroll it. I hate this. I use a program called XMouse Button Control which will scroll the control under the mouse cursor without having focus. I have disabled this program and when I focus the RichEdit, it will scroll with the mousewheel, but with the program enabled, I can't even scroll with the RichEdit focused.

I know this is kinda petty, but this program I'm writing is going to be used almost constantly every day and I don't want to have to choose between the two. I've tried a couple other programs (WizMouse, KatMouse) that do the same function as XMouse but they don't work with my program either. I'd like to try to identify and fix the problem in my UI, with your help.

I've attached the full script. I've run Au3Info and when I move the target over the RichEdit, I see the typical RICHEDIT50W type. I'm starting to mess with styles on both the Tab control and the RichEdit control but I don't know if any of that will help.

Thanks for reading!

MultiTerm.zip

Edited February 20, 2013 by sentry07

[Melba23]

sentry07,

The "IBar/arrow cursor flicker" when over certain controls has been reported from time to time - here is one I know of. Unfortunately other people seem not to suffer the same effect when running exactly the same script - I get no flicker at all with your script - which makes it very hard to offer any real solution. It seems to be particular to certain machine setups and, given the infinity of available combinations, almost impossible to analyse given the very few cases that we hear about.

The interaction of your AutoIt script (or rather lack of it) with XMouse sounds like a low level incompatibility. As far as I know AutoIt uses only standard Windows API calls - it sounds like XMouse and the other apps do something clever to work their magic and that simple old AutoIt just gets bypassed in the rush.

Sorry if all that sounds rather dismissive - and I am not trying to show AutoIt as perfect - but unless we can positively identify a circumstance in which the flicker problem is consistently reproduceable, I do not believe that there is not much we can do to help.

M23

[sentry07]

Well, I fixed my problem, so to speak. After much tweaking and trying many different combinations, I found that the problem with scrolling occurred when the Tab control was behind the RichEdit, for whatever reason. So I resized the Tab control to be just the height of the tabs themselves since I'm managing objects on the GUI myself anyway. This also fixed the cursor blinking problem.

Now I just need to figure out why the script doesn't work on Win8.