Re: (describe-function 'self-insert-command) takes too long

[Kevin Rodgers]

Drew Adams wrote:
> emacs -Q
>
> (describe-function 'self-insert-command) takes too long. In highly
> interactive settings, where, for example, describe-function is, in
> effect, bound to a mouse click or keystroke on a command name, the
> time required can make this seem very unresponsive, even
> non-interactive.  If a command requires even a little additional
> computation, before calling `describe-function', the response time can
> easily be unacceptable.
>
> The performance bottleneck would appear to be in
> `describe-function-1', at the place where this comment appears:
>
>           ;; FIXME: This list can be very long (f.ex. for self-insert-command).
>           ;; If there are many, remove them from KEYS.
>
> So, please FIXME ;-). An acceptable workaround would be to test
> explicitly for `self-insert-command', and then just print "many
> ordinary text characters" immediately.

I don't think I want the list of keys eliminated completely like that.
Would it be possible to avoid listing the thousands of keys that are
described only as "Character set FOO"?  I don't care if there's no glyph
for the character, but repeated entries like the following are not
helpful:

Character set JISX0213-2
...
Character set Tibetan 2 column
...
Character set Indian 2 Column
...
Character set CNS11643-7 (Chinese traditional): ISO-IR-187
...
Character set CNS11643-6 (Chinese traditional): ISO-IR-186
...
Character set CNS11643-5 (Chinese traditional): ISO-IR-185
...
Character set CNS11643-5 (Chinese traditional): ISO-IR-185
...
Character set CNS11643-4 (Chinese traditional): ISO-IR-184
...
Character set CNS11643-3 (Chinese traditional): ISO-IR-183
...
Character set Ethiopic characters
...
Character set Unicode subset (U+0100..U+24FF)
...
Character set Unicode subset (U+E000+FFFF)
...
Character set Unicode subset (U+2500..U+33FF)
...
Character set Unicode subset (U+2500..U+33FF)
...
Character set Tibetan 1 column
...
Character set Indian glyph
...

...
Character set Big5 (Level-2) C940-FEFE
...
Character set Big5 (Level-1) A141-C67F
...
Character set JISX0213-1
...
Character set JISX0213-1
...
Character set CNS11643-2 (Chinese traditional): ISO-IR-172
...
Character set CNS11643-1 (Chinese traditional): ISO-IR-171
...
Character set JISX0212 (Japanese): ISO-IR-159
...
Character set KSC5601 (Korean): ISO-IR-149
...
Character set JISX0208.1983/1990 (Japanese): ISO-IR-87
...
Character set GB2312: ISO-IR-58
...
Character set JISX0208.1978 (Japanese): ISO-IR-42
...

--
Kevin