Re: How to speed up cutting & pasting from/to emacs?

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Sharon Kimble <boudiccas@skimble.plus.com> writes:

> I'm involved in a project which involves a lot of
> pasting into emacs From the clipboard, which is
> taking a long time.

The best answer/method is: don't do it!

What other program(s) are you using, to/from which you
copy/paste? Have you examined if Emacs can do what
these programs do, in what case you don't have that
problem anymore but can rely on kill/yank instead,
which is much more powerful and fast.

Examples, instead of - use: Thunderbird -> Gnus (what
I remember you already use that), Irssi -> ERC, man
pages with man/less in the shell -> M-x man RET,
Iceweasel/Firefox -> Emacs-w3m. And so on.

> How can I speed up the cutting and pasting please?

What do you mean "speed up", exactly? Do you use the
GUI Emacs in X? And in another window, you have
another program with text? Again, the best thing is if
what that program does can be done in Emacs, which is
very likely, and Emacs probably does it better as
well. If this can't be done for whatever reason, you
need a window manager in X with a shortcut to iterate
windows. I use Openbox with which it is possible to
select window with M-TAB (in Emacs' notation). So in
the other program you cut the text. Then hit M-TAB to
go to Emacs. Then hit whatever key you have assigned
to paste it, if it isn't integrated with the kill
ring already, in what case C-y is fine (it doesn't
matter in terms of speed if the "paste from clipboard"
shortcut is as short and close as C-y).

If this is the situation you already have, elaborate
further what you mean by making it faster.

In general,

1) Use Emacs for everything.

2) Don't use the mouse.

3) Use shortcuts that are short and close.

4) Integrate Emacs with external programs by setting
   up (keyboard) shortcuts to go to and from them.
   For example, if the M-TAB window iteration method
   isn't fast enough (if you have tons of windows),
   setup a shortcut in X (with xbindkeys) to go
   directly to the Emacs window, and then setup
   another shortcut to go directly to the program from
   which you copy text. This isn't difficult to do:
   use 'wmctrl'.

Keep on asking until you get it if you get stuck.
Things like this are very important and they are what
makes the difference between fun and productive and
miserable and somewhat less productive, and you don't
want to make that trade.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573