Re: maximum number of radio targets?

["John Niekrasz" <john.niekrasz@gmail.com>]

Hi Carsten,

I'm not an emacs lisp programmer, but I figured out how to evaluate
emacs lisp variables at least. If I create a file with a ton of
automatically generated numeric radio targets and then evaluate the
variable "org-target-link-regexp", I get this message:

Error during redisplay: (invalid-regexp Regular expression too big) [28 times]

Whereas if I do it with a reasonable amount, I get something
reasonable like this:

"\\<\\(2999\\|2998\\|2997\\|2996\\|2995\\|2994\\|2993\\|...

So it seems to me that emacs has a regular expression length limit,
and that this is indeed the cause of the problem. I can also suggest
that the slowness you have hypothesized has not occurred for me...at
least not up to the regular expression max length, which allows me to
have about 2000 5-character radio tags.

I'm going to investigate whether the regular expression length can be
changed and will report back.

John

On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Carsten Dominik <dominik@science.uva.nl> wrote:
> Hi John, I think you are *clearly* overdoing the radiolink feature.  The
> problem is that the implementation uses font-lock to activate matches, so
> that these are always up to date.  This clearly means that the number of
> links must be limited.  I am not sure what the limitation is in Emacs, but I
> would also suspect that, with this many radio targets, you should be feeling
> the speed impact with every single character you type - oy you must either
> have a *very* fast machine - or be a sloooow typist :-)     ?
>
> With this many links, I guess a different implementation for radio links
> would be needed, one that does not use font-lock, but some mechanism that
> uses idle time.
>
> We don't have such a mechanism yet. There are some plans, in particular to
> support automatic inter-file links like HOWM does it, by these have not
> moved beyond the "wishful thinking" stage.
>
> This could be a nice extension!  Anyone feels challenged to implement it?
>
> - Carsten
>
> On Sep 6, 2008, at 6:41 PM, John Niekrasz wrote:
>
>> Hello org-mode folks,
>>
>> I really like the radio targets feature. Perhaps too much. I seem to
>> have encountered a case where using too many of them means that they
>> don't work. We're talking about 2k of them, with an average length of
>> 15 characters or so. Is it possible that the orgmode internal regexps
>> are getting too long? Is there a general emacs string variable size
>> limit I can change to make things work?
>>
>> I'm using GNU Emacs 23.0.60.4 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version
>> 2.10.13) and orgmode 6.06b.
>>
>> I've attached a file as an example. The links don't come up on
>> loading. But if you erase everything after line 1500 (or alternately
>> before line 1500), it works.
>> John
>> <test.org><mime-attachment.txt>
>
>