On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 10:11 PM, Frank Fischer <[email protected]> wrote:
Am Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:40:49 +0200 schrieb Nikolai Weibull <[email protected]>:
I just hold down ‘w’ and let it auto-repeat. Did you try that?
Yes, that's what I tried but apparently on a too powerful machine ...
Ah, so it was a question of computing power, after all.
I ran with emacs -Q and load evil manually, with the same result (Fundamental mode). It’s not an old machine either (but I don’t think that’s relevant, as this command shouldn’t be slow on any sort of machine).
Certainly you're right, it should be fast. I've just tried it again on my old notebook and there holding 'w' pressed shows a big slowdown (the cursor does not move at all until the button is released).
The problem is that evil does a lot of cleanup work after each single command (usually in post-command-hooks, for example the repeat-system and cursor adjustment at the eol and eob). And this is partially relatively expensive (compared to a single forward-word) and probably be improved (IIRC there's a function `evil-adjust-cursor' that sometimes does some heavy stuff and it is called in forward word motions but not in the backward direction).
I’m on a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. This work your talking about must somehow be shuffling around a lot of memory or something similarly expensive. Is the gap being moved? I mean, what can be so expensive? Is it the use of saved restrictions/excursions? It makes me sad when a text editor is slow in the year 2012 (on late year 2008 hardware). (I’m not blaming you, it’s just sad that this can even occur.) I guess the upshot is that it gives me added incentive to try to stop just holding down movement keys and instead use isearch or pressing “10w”.