Re: Strange slowness when killing words interactively

[Taylor Venable]

On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 01:36, David De La Harpe Golden
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On 03/05/11 12:51, Taylor Venable wrote:
>> No, this is using the GTK interface. :-)
>
> You mean emacs itself? It's more if you were running emacs on a motif/cde
> desktop (or maybe just one with an xclipboard hanging about).

Ah, yes; I meant that I'm using the Emacs GTK GUI.

> ** What desktop environment (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc.), if any, are you using?

XFCE 4.8.0

> ** Come to think of it, what does this:
> (x-selection-exists-p 'CLIPBOARD_MANAGER)
> return in your emacs?

t

> GNOME - and apparently now recent XFCE - do actually have tiny clipboard
> managers by default (embedded in gnome-settings-daemon and
> xfce4-settings-helper respectively), but AFAIUI they shouldn't be
> problematic like motif-era ones: Nowadays there is a protocol [1] for
> clients to ask a clipboard manager only at client exit time to copy the
> clipboard content and take over clipboard ownership from the client, to
> persist the clipboard after client exit, and those managers are about
> supporting those clients.  I only recently learned of the XFCE one and
> haven't really looked at it yet, though.

That appears to be the case here, the sort-of hidden clipboard manager
in XFCE, because there do not appear to be any separate processes
running that are related to clipboard management.

> Actually, I think emacs is not doing its part of [1], though it shouldn't
> typically have negative effects except when you try to paste after copying
> in emacs and then quitting, so not directly related to your problem.  But
> I'm now looking at that "Clipboard managers are encouraged to use this
> information to support legacy clients" line in [1] - maybe there might be a
> clipboard manager out there that grabs clipboard contents from "legacy
> clients" eagerly but avoids pestering the clients that indicate their
> support of the spec. That would mean even "legacy client" clipboard contents
> wouldn't lost when they exit ...but "legacy client" performance would be
> degraded.

I did just try firing up FVWM to check it out, and Emacs performs at
high speed there, no problems. So the problem may very well be related
to XFCE, or how Emacs interacts with XFCE.

-- 
Taylor C. Venable
http://metasyntax.net/