Re: Console-window Emacs stops responding when pasting clipboard

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

Davor Cubranic <cubranic@cs.ubc.ca> writes:
> I run Emacs in a Putty terminal window (xterm emulation), and when I
> paste the contents of certain web pages I copied from Mozilla, Emacs
> stops responding. For an example, select the entire 11th paragraph in
> the body of the article at
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1152570,00.html
> (starting with "It all ran a bit out of control"). Paste it into Emacs
> (shift-insert in putty). Emacs stops responding until I press C-g. It
> looks like the dashes ("...were coming to see me -- everyone knows
> everyone in this town -- and saying...") are the cause of the problem,

I don't use Windows, but on GNU/Linux I can observe a similar anomaly,
and I think that it could explain this behavior too.

When a single 0xAD character is pasted into Emacs invoked with a -nw
inside an xterm, then after 1 sec Emacs displays "M---" in the echo area.
This means it interprets 0xAD as a meta character with the highest bit
set in the - (0x2D) character.

This explains why the text " - everyone knows everyone in this town - "
is pasted as " everyone knows everyone in this town " into GNU/Linux xterm.
It eats dashes with the following space because it interprets "-" as
a negative integer argument and insert the next character with -1 argument,
i.e. inserts nothing.  And it may also explain its behavior in a Windows
terminal window with Emacs in xterm, where perhaps it stops waiting
for a negative numeric prefix argument.

(BTW, since the phrase "everyone knows everyone in this town" from the
article was mentioned several times on this thread, I can confirm,
just for your information, how true this statement is!  It is even
often named as "glass city" where "everyone sees everyone", all this
due to the specific population distribution.)

-- 
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/