bug#16129: 24.3.50; Emacs slow with follow-mode when buffer ends before last window

[Anders Lindgren]

Hi!

Thanks, I tried it out on the trunk, and it seems to be working correctly!

I'm open to reimplementing follow-mode in another way, if you think that it's necessary. However, there are two different uses of set-window-start, and maybe we don't need to change both:

* Normally, when the position of the active window change, the start of the other windows are updated. This occurs very infrequent, and it would require a redisplay anyway.

* When a window shows the empty tail of a buffer, point-max is "hammered" into window-start to ensure that the display engine doesn't recenter the window.

Of the two uses, I only consider the second a problem. However, it would probably be easy to handle if there would be a windows-specific option or call-back that could control if the window should  be recentered or not.

While I'm at it, I realized today that the responsiveness when using follow-mode was better when running the cursor up and down compared to left and right. When looking into the details I saw that the arrow keys no longer were bound to previous- and next-char, so we need to apply the patch below to follow-mode (I don't have write-access to the archives).

Thanks for your help,

    Anders

=== modified file 'lisp/follow.el'

--- lisp/follow.el 2014-01-01 07:43:34 +0000

+++ lisp/follow.el 2014-01-07 07:48:40 +0000

@@ -311,7 +311,7 @@

  (set-default symbol value)))

 

 (defvar follow-cache-command-list

-  '(next-line previous-line forward-char backward-char)

+  '(next-line previous-line forward-char backward-char right-char left-char)

   "List of commands that don't require recalculation.

 

 In order to be able to use the cache, a command should not change the

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2014 09:20:03 +0100
> From: Anders Lindgren <andlind@gmail.com>
> Cc: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, 16129@debbugs.gnu.org

>
> I think the incorrect state occurs when the new early exit occurs from
> redsplay_window. When I added the condition "&& PT == w->last_point", both
> the recentering problem and speed issues were solved.

Indeed, this was my conclusion as well.  (Except that PT is not quite
right, as the window could be displaying a buffer that is not the
current one at that early point in redisplay_window.)

What this caused was that the window redisplay was mistakenly skipped,
but then we marked that window's display "accurate", which confused
the heck out of the display engine.

So I installed the patch below to fix this regression, and I'm marking
this bug done.  Feel free to reopen if there are any leftovers.

Btw, I strongly recommend against messing with window-start (or
anything else that potentially requires redisplay) in a
post-command-hook: doing so disables some important redisplay
optimizations, and can easily trigger subtle misfeatures.  I suggest
to look for a better method to do what follow-mode needs to do, even
if that means we'd have to implement a special hook we don't yet have.

Thanks.

=== modified file 'src/xdisp.c'
--- src/xdisp.c 2014-01-01 17:44:48 +0000
+++ src/xdisp.c 2014-01-06 16:21:39 +0000
@@ -15621,7 +15621,8 @@ redisplay_window (Lisp_Object window, bo
       && REDISPLAY_SOME_P ()
       && !w->redisplay
       && !f->redisplay
-      && !buffer->text->redisplay)
+      && !buffer->text->redisplay
+      && BUF_PT (buffer) == w->last_point)
     return;

   /* Make sure that both W's markers are valid.  */