Draw the plan sheet cheaper: a shadow under it, commands in one field past twenty

[donislawdev]

W6 of the performance series that followed the external performance report - the plan sheet, report items G-6 and G-7. It closes the series.

What changes on screen

• The sheet's shadow lies under it instead of on it. The shadow looks the same. The sheet's text is sharper, because an effect on an element turns ClearType off for everything under it.
• Past twenty lines, commands stand in one read-only field with Copy all over it, instead of a box, a scroller and a Copy button per line. A single line is copied by selecting it in the field. This applies to both lists that use the same template - the equivalent commands before a run and the way back after one (GUI rule 5).
• Entries the machine does not work without are named in one sentence per kind over the confirmation box, instead of one sentence per plan.

Why

• G-6: an effect takes its whole subtree as input, so every caret blink and every tick of a run re-blurred the sheet. With software rendering - which is what WPF uses over Remote Desktop unless the application opts in - that was a third to half of a core while the confirmation box held the keyboard.
• G-7: a stop over a whole scope printed 334 command boxes, 5013 of the sheet's 7185 elements, and the window stood still for half a second while they were built.
• Found while measuring: on that same plan the footer grew a sentence per plan touching a critical entry and left the body holding the steps one unit tall, so the preview showed none of the steps.

Measured after the build, same probe (row-cost.ps1 -PlanCost), Release, no elevation

	before	after
elements in the sheet, stop over the whole Services scope (334 steps)	7185	2534
height of the body holding the steps	1 unit	221 units
sheet to idle, same plan	456-800 ms	302-411 ms (one run on a busy machine: 502-721)
processor with the caret in the box, software rendering	207-262 ms/s (look before this change, same process)	2-6 ms/s

How

• New CommandBlock (lines, what is listed one at a time, whether they stand at once, the joined text, any, several) replaces six properties on Planned. Each section of commands binds its block as its data, so the Copy all button's name, content, tip, tag and visibility move into PlanCopyAllButton.
• PlanSheetFrame holds the shape the sheet and PlanSheetShadow both wear. The shadow takes no hit tests.
• ChromelessBox is split out of SearchFieldBox - the field of commands is the second box standing in a frame drawn by something else. Resources of a BasedOn style reach the box, guarded on the built window for all three boxes.
• The gathering of critical sentences is in the window (PlanWords.Describe over a list), not in the core: the core's warnings reach the JSON of --dry-run, which is a public contract. The warning about a process taking others with it is not gathered, since its sentence names one entry.
• PlanView.xaml comes down from 178 to 174 lines of markup, so the markup ceiling is lowered to 176.
• The catalogue guard for tall samples asked about PlanSheet, which was tall only because of the margin that moved to its cell. No style or template sample is taller than a row today (the tallest is 86.6 of 96), so the guard now asks that every sample's flag equals its measurement.

Checks

• Narrow test run over the plan, catalogue, contrast and text classes: all green except PluralGuards.What_the_window_admits_has_a_singular_for_one_entry, which reads "Running without administrator rights" in a session without elevation - a known failure of this session, not of this change.
• Architecture tests 182 of 182.
• Mutation register: 28 of 28 new, re-anchored and neighbouring entries caught, stale check clean.
• The focus edge of the field lights on a shown window: #4A4A4A without focus, #65A3D8 with the keyboard in the field, read off pixels.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[coderabbitai]

Important

• 🔍 Trigger review

This repository does not receive automatic reviews because it has fewer than 10 stars.

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Repository UI (base), Organization UI (inherited)

Review profile: ASSERTIVE

Plan: Advanced

Run ID: 9d17e7c8-8625-45cd-9684-872ededda73f

---

Thanks for using CodeRabbit! It's free for OSS, and your support helps us grow. If you like it, consider giving us a shout-out.

❤️ Share

• X
• Mastodon
• Reddit
• LinkedIn

_{Comment @coderabbitai help to get the list of available commands.}