Re: Strange slowness when killing words interactively

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

On 03/05/11 12:51, Taylor Venable wrote:

>
>> Is there any chance he's using Motif?  The Motif clipboard protocol is
>> capable of producing delays that even the US immigration service would
>> envy.
>
> 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).

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

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

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.

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.

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ClipboardManager