Cursor movement key repeat painfully slow when text selected

Cursor movement key repeat painfully slow when text selected

[Skip Montanaro]

I work in an environment where my desktop computer runs Win 7 and I
use PuTTY to connect to the Linux hosts on which I actually do
software development. When I get to a dev host, I run a GUI instance
of Emacs. It comes up in its own X window. Everything's fine until I
select some text. Emacs helpfully changes the background to indicate
the region between point and mark which is currently selected. If I
hold down any cursor movement keys (arrows, C-p, C-n, etc) cursor
movement grinds to a halt. I suspect the basic problem is that the
Xming X11 server is a dog.

Is there some way to make the highlighting of the selected region
lighter weight (maybe just highlight mark and point or just mark) so
less work needs to be done by the server to keep the display updated?
Unfortunately, PuTTY and Xming are a given. I have no ability to
replace them with anything more efficient.

Thx,

Skip Montanaro

Re: Cursor movement key repeat painfully slow when text selected

[hector]

On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 01:14:49PM -0500, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> I work in an environment where my desktop computer runs Win 7 and I
> use PuTTY to connect to the Linux hosts on which I actually do
> software development. When I get to a dev host, I run a GUI instance
> of Emacs. It comes up in its own X window. Everything's fine until I
> select some text. Emacs helpfully changes the background to indicate
> the region between point and mark which is currently selected. If I
> hold down any cursor movement keys (arrows, C-p, C-n, etc) cursor
> movement grinds to a halt. I suspect the basic problem is that the
> Xming X11 server is a dog.
> 
> Is there some way to make the highlighting of the selected region
> lighter weight (maybe just highlight mark and point or just mark) so
> less work needs to be done by the server to keep the display updated?
> Unfortunately, PuTTY and Xming are a given. I have no ability to
> replace them with anything more efficient.

I like the old emacs behaviour with no transient mark mode.
(M-x transient-mark-mode). After all you can always know where the region
is with exchange-point-and-mark.

Re: Cursor movement key repeat painfully slow when text selected

[Skip Montanaro]

On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 2:16 PM, hector <hectorlahoz@gmail.com> wrote:
> I like the old emacs behaviour with no transient mark mode.
> (M-x transient-mark-mode). After all you can always know where the region
> is with exchange-point-and-mark.

Thank you! I didn't remember the name (called "highlight active
region" in the menu). I agree, C-x C-x is all you really need to see
what your active region is.

Skip