Conceivably, although I wasn't referring to the manual, even after I isolated the offending regexp. On Mon, Jun 6, 2022 at 3:15 PM Richard Stallman wrote: > [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] > [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] > [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > > > That's a regexp with a lot of backtracking, I think (i.e., elements > that > > can be matched both by the ?'s as well as the two *'s). So matching > > this will be slow, which results in the hangs you're seeing when Emacs > > is trying to match that to the text in the buffer. > > Would it make sense to say more about this point in the Emacs Lisp Manual > where it describes regexps? > > -- > Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) > Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) > Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) > Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) > > >