What do these options actually do?

I've been using MUSHClient for nine or ten years and I've never really figured out what changes the following options have on the display in MUSHClient, so I thought I'd finally ask about them.

The following options seem to have no visible effect no matter what computer or OS I install MUSHclient under (and I've used it under Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 so far)

File/Global Preferences/General
Smoother Scrolling
(No effect)
Very Smooth Scrolling
(This, however does make text scroll slowly, but text still appears in chunks rather than scrolling smoothly onto the screen)

Game/Configuration/Appearance/Output
Alternative Inverse/Hilight Display
(Inverse and hilight look the same no matter what I do)

Smooth scrolling was more relevant before miniwindows, which changed the way output is drawn.

Alternative inverse changes the way it inverts bold text.

More specifically, I think the difference is that if you have bold foreground over a background (effectively hilighted text) and then it is inverted, the difference is, is the highlighting also inverted?

eg.

highlight green / red

inverted -->

red / highlight green

or ...

hightlight red / green

I'd always expected the hilight to invert along with the foreground/background options rather than stay on the foreground.

I believe that normal ANSI codes don't have an option for specifically hilighting the background, so the only way to get a hilighted background color is to hilight the foreground and then invert.

If you're starting with highlight green / red and make it inverted, which is the "alternate" setting and which is "normal"?

is red / highlight green the alternate

or ...

is highlight red / green the alternate?

Answered my question with some testing.


ALTERNATIVE setting allows the hilight to move to the background when inverted (what I consider to be normal, personally)

NORMAL setting makes the hilight stay on the foreground no matter what.

Additionally, if you change the setting in the menu, it takes effect on the entire screen and not just on new lines displayed after the change.

It seems to me that if Ansi doesn't allow highlighted background that you therefore invert first and then apply the highlight to whatever foreground you have. But if I am wrong then that is what the option is for.