Enable Classic Window Buffering

Ralph J.

enjoys cheese
just found this sweet little hack over at macosxhints.com. it's awesome.

from macosxhints....
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Andrew Welch of Ambrosia Software, who posted a patch which enables window buffer compression, has done it again. This time, however, he's applied a similar patch to the Classic environment -- classihack. Here's what he said about the patch:

"classihack is a little hack that turns on Classic window buffering. The windows of your Classic applications will redraw instantly, instead of being painted white and then slowly updated. In addition to having Classic windows update more quickly, this has the added benefit of making window shadows work properly on Classic windows.

classihack activates a hidden feature in the window server. Apple likely left this feature disabled for a reason, however I have found that enabling it makes Classic work much better for me. Use it at your own risk.

WARNING: With classihack enabled, if you switch monitor color depths (say from Thousands to Millions) or if you switch monitor resolutions, the window server will crash. This has the effect of immediately quitting all of your running applications.

This hack is entirely free, and entirely unsupported."

It's hard to describe exactly how well this works without seeing it in action. Classic windows update instantly and the drop shadows from OS X apps are perfect when dragged across Classic windows. In addition, dragging objects over Classic windows is also much smoother.

When you double-click classihack, it applies the hack to your Classic environment. Subsequent launches of Classic (even from the System Prefs Classic panel) will have window buffering enabled. To disable it again, simply logout and login. I've been using it since yesterday and haven't noticed any problems yet ... but there may well be a good reason why Apple left it disabled, so use at your own risk!
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download it here..

ftp://ftp.AmbrosiaSW.com/pub/freebies/classihack1.0.0d1.sit

edit: just discovered that this hack plays havoc with open Photoshop documents. oh well, it's STILL cool, though.
 
Ralph J, thanks a lot for that link to the patch. No more dreaded classic redrawing!! Thanks too, to my old time online friend Andrew Welsh. I have been running it on several classic apps with out a problem so far.
 
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