Re: Strange slowness when killing words interactively

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

On 02/05/11 05:25, Taylor Venable wrote:

> Indeed, setting interprogram-cut-function to nil improves the speed
> dramatically to the normal levels that I see on other machines and in
> the console.  The default value is x-select-text. The problem is also
> fixed by setting x-select-enable-clipboard to nil.


Just in case:

Is your emacs running on the same machine as the x11 server, or
remotely?

Are you running a clipboard daemon (e.g. kde klipper, xfce4-clipman) in
your desktop environment? Typically such a thing shows up as a little
clipboard icon in the system tray, with a click on it maybe showing a
history of previous clipboard contents, a bit like a system-wide
kill-ring.  They can in theory cause some slowness by eagerly grabbing
clipboard contents (and sometimes primary selection too) for history
keeping purposes. It's not usually perceptible when everything's local,
though.  If you find such a daemon running, please try temporarily
disabling it and retesting (you'll still have basic clipboard
functionality without the daemon).

Probably you'd have already mentioned if you were seeing similar
symptoms in non-emacs applications that interact with the x11
clipboard, but if you have the "xclip" command line tool available
(arch extra package xclip, apparently), you also could see if the
following is near instantaneous (it really should be):

$ echo 'Hello, World.' | xclip -selection clipboard
$ xclip -selection clipboard -o
Hello, World.