Re: redisplay-dont-pause

[Richard Stallman]

    When the value is nil, Emacs checks at several places during redisplay
    whether some input is available, and if so, it aborts the redisplay
    cycle to handle the incoming input.  That has the effect of forcing a
    full redisplay on the next opportunity, for those frames that were not
    completely redisplayed.  Here, "full" means that all display
    optimizations are wholesale disabled for all windows on the frame.

That is strange.  I wonder why it does that?

In the old days, Emacs would update the display records for each line
that it output, so that the subsequent redisplay would know where it
was starting from.

Maybe this has to do with the variable height of lines, and overlap of lines.

    the display gets stuck because Emacs cannot keep up with the input and
    completely stops displaying.

Over any substantial period, if the commands come so fast that excuting
them leaves no time for redisplay, Emacs should not redisplay at all.
You might describe that by saying "the display gets stuck", but this
is what should happen.

     . it effectively slows down the keyboard auto-repeat rate (because
       events need to wait for the end of redisplay before they are
       processed), but only by a small factor, so the user experience is
       that Emacs does succeed to keep up.

I am lost here.  The keyboard determines its auto-repeat rate.
Emacs can't slow it down.  All it can do is skip redisplays so
as to cope with the commands at the rate they are generated.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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