Re: Emacs on OS X development

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "John Wiegley" <johnw@newartisans.com>
> Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:45:34 -0500
> 
> Waiting until NS finds its star developer does not seem like a real strategy
> to me

Then don't wait.  Sit down and start hacking.  You will get a lot of
support from everyone here, as soon as you start asking technical
questions and seek advice how to attack specific problems.

> Simply because non-OS X users don't seem to care what happens on OS X, doesn't
> mean it should be this easy to ignore the problem.  It hasn't "gone away" in a
> few years now, and I don't see why that's suddenly going to change now.

This line of argument won't get you anywhere, believe me.  Been there
done that -- I waited for 6 years for Someone™ to come and incorporate
the bidi reordering engine into Emacs redisplay, which I wrote and
debugged back in 2002, but finally had to do it myself.  If I hadn't,
Emacs would still live in unidirectional world today.

> When in a scratch buffer, if I enable flyspell-mode, I can type fast enough
> that Emacs can't insert the characters as quickly as I can type.
> 
> It's this last problem that makes the NS port entirely unusable to
> me.

Then attack this one first.

For starters, flyspell.el is not supposed to do anything until it sees
that you completed a word.  So as long as you type letters with no
whitespace or punctuation, the slowdown should be minimal to
non-existent, and the external speller program is not involved.  Do
you still see significant slowdown while typing a single long word?
Or does it get slow only as soon as a word is completed and flyspell
starts talking to the speller?