Re: Problems with unicode characters under emacs and Xorg

[David Edmondson <dme@dme.org>]

On Sunday, 2020-11-01 at 22:57:58 -08, David Mazieres wrote:

> I usually use notmuch in emacs under X windows on arch linux.  Recently,
> I've had a problem where some screens in notmuch take several minutes of
> 100% CPU time to load.  For example, I'll just open a search, and emacs
> will completely lock up (even Ctrl-G doesn't do anything) for 3 minutes
> while my fan spins and my laptop battery drains significantly.
>
> This appears to be related to the display of certain unicode characters
> in email--particularly if they are in the email subject, because then
> the whole search screen will freeze.  So far, the only workaround I've
> found is to kill -15 emacs, start it again in an xterm or urxvt with
> "emacs -nw", delete or archive the offending message, and then restart
> the Xorg emacs.  This is quite painful particularly since it's not
> always obvious which email message is causing the problem.
>
> Has anyone else experienced this problem?  Is there any way to
> workaround the problem by, for instance, defaulting to unibyte mode for
> notmuch buffers?  I do use unicode for other languages, but I guess
> wouldn't mind having to type "M-x toggle-enable-multibyte-characters" to
> get them if as a result my emacs never locked up.
>
> It's likely that this is an emacs-wide problem, but since whatever these
> characters are only show up in email, I'm hoping there are people on
> this list who know how to solve the problem or have better workarounds.

I haven't seen this. Threads with a lot of complex HTML content (lots of
nested tables, for example) can take a long time to render for me, but
that is generally interruptable.

Could you share one of these messages, or a sufficiently similar test
case?

dme.
-- 
Driving at 90 down those country lanes, singing to "Tiny Dancer".