How do you prevent a RichTextBox from refreshing its display?

Question

I have a RichTextBox where I need to update the Text property frequently, but when I do so the RichTextBox \"blinks\" annoyingly as it refreshes all throughout a method call

Answer 1

I asked the original question, and the answer that worked best for me was BoltBait's use of SendMessage() with WM_SETREDRAW. It seems to have fewer side effects than the use of the WndProc method, and in my application performs twice as fast as LockWindowUpdate.

Within my extended RichTextBox class, I just added these two methods, and I call them whenever I need to stop restart repainting while I'm doing some processing. If I were wanting to do this from outside of the RichTextBox class, I think it would work by just replacing "this" with the reference to your RichTextBox instance.

    private void StopRepaint()
    {
        // Stop redrawing:
        SendMessage(this.Handle, WM_SETREDRAW, 0, IntPtr.Zero);
        // Stop sending of events:
        eventMask = SendMessage(this.Handle, EM_GETEVENTMASK, 0, IntPtr.Zero);
    }

    private void StartRepaint()
    {
        // turn on events
        SendMessage(this.Handle, EM_SETEVENTMASK, 0, eventMask);
        // turn on redrawing
        SendMessage(this.Handle, WM_SETREDRAW, 1, IntPtr.Zero);
        // this forces a repaint, which for some reason is necessary in some cases.
        this.Invalidate();
    }