Copy/paste slowness with osx configuration layer in terminal

[fedragon]

Hi,
I recently installed Spacemacs and I'm very happy with it but I have some issues with the osx configuration layer, when running from terminal: if I enable it, any copy/paste operation becomes very slow (2-3 seconds). On the other hand, without osx layer, clipboard-kill-region or clipboard-yank execute instantly.
I'm running Spacemacs in Yosemite from iTerm2, inside or outside tmux (it does not seem to make a difference on this regard). As I mentioned, I don't have this issue with the GUI app.

@syl20bnr Thank you for creating Spacemacs by the way, it's amazing!

[syl20bnr]

This is slow right from the start or does it become slow after some time ?

[fedragon]

Hi @syl20bnr,
it is slow from the start.
Here are my software versions and what I already tried, I hope it will give you some more handle on this:

Emacs: 24.5.1 (installed via brew install emacs-mac)
iTerm2: 2.9.20150616-nightly (I also tried running in Terminal, the issue is still there)
Spacemacs: master branch (I also tried develop, the issue is still there)

I tried to remove as much as possible from my .spacemacs and I can still reproduce the issue with only:

dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
'(
     emacs-lisp
     osx
     )

[antonyshchenko]

@fedragon, I've had this problem and the solution for me was to use osx-clipboard package.

Add osx-clipboard to packages list in your packages.el and then:

(defun <your private layer name>/init-osx-clipboard ()
  (use-package osx-clipboard
    :config
    (progn
      (osx-clipboard-mode +1)
      (diminish 'osx-clipboard-mode))))

After this you can use regular VIM key-bindings for pasting (p in normal mode and C-r in insert mode). Cmd-v is still slow, though.

[fedragon]

thank you @env0der I will try this as soon as I can!

[fedragon]

Uhm I get Could not load osx-clipboard-mode at startup. Do you maybe have any clue why?

[antonyshchenko]

@fedragon did you add it to list of packages in packages.el?

Take a look at https://github.com/env0der/dotemacs/blob/spacemacs/env0der/packages.el#L27

[fedragon]

@env0der I figured out the issue, there is a small typo in your example: use-package osx-clipboard-mode should actually be use-package osx-clipboard...

Besides this, it works like a charm! Maybe you could fix your code examples above, in case anybody else needs this :)

Thank you very much again!

[antonyshchenko]

@fedragon, good catch, thanks!

[d12frosted]

Can't reproduce it even with copying buffer that contains 24337 lines. Copies instantly, pastes instantly. iTerm2, Terminal.app. But El Capitan.

[fedragon]

@d12frosted thanks for taking a look! I haven't upgraded to El Capitan yet but I do update spacemacs on a regular basis and I still have this issue... not sure how to give you more context.

[d12frosted]

@fedragon so pbcopy doesn't work for you as good as osx-clipboard, huh? Looks like pbcopy has richer functionality (and I am not really understand all it's features), while osx-clipboard is very simple and straightforward.

@syl20bnr have you considered using osx-clipboard instead of pbcopy? What are the advantages of the currently used package?

[fedragon]

@d12frosted looking at the osx-clipboard source code, I would think that it uses pbcopy under the hood:

It sets the variables interprogram-cut-function' and interprogram-paste-function' to thin wrappers around the
"pbcopy" and "pbpaste" command-line programs.

[d12frosted]

@fedragon yeah, pbcopy and pbpaste are OS X commands. But pbcopy.el uses pbcopy and pbpaste commands as well. Sorry for the confusion about pbcopy as emacs package vs pbcopy as OS X command.

[fedragon]

@d12frosted no problem, actually thanks for explaining!

[codedmart]

@fedragon @d12frosted Any changes on this. If I use osx-clipboard and p or C-r as @env0der mentioned paste is instant, but if I use CMD-v it is terribly slow.

[fedragon]

@codedmart I'm not using Spacemacs on a daily basis these days so I cannot confirm it unfortunately

[d12frosted]

@codedmart never use CMD-v in terminal, since (AFAIK) you can't override this shortcut. Which means that text from clipboard will be pasted into terminal avoiding any hooks / configs for text yanking in emacs. It means that any goodies for indentation will not be called and most importantly, pasting huge hunks of text will be slow as hell.

I know that habits are hard to change, but using C-y for pasting is pretty good in terminal, since it work not only in emacs (just try typing something in terminal and then doing C-a, then C-k and then C-y).

[theckman]

I've had the osx layer working for me for nearly 6 months. Only within the past week did this become an issue. The issue persists across restarts of emacs and OS X.

[hooleyhoop]

this is a bit anecdotal but fwiw.. when i have the osx layer enabled, pasting takes as long as it would take to start a new shell. i.e. if i put something silly in my .zshenv that takes 3 minutes, then pasting in emacs will take 3 minutes.

[paultopia]

This just started happening to me. Like today. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, both copy and paste in spacemacs in OSX take forever. And I haven't changed any major configuration---seriously the only thing I can think of that I've done is move some environment variables around.

And for me, it happens in GUI, and happens both with standard osx control-v keybindings and with vim keybindings.

After commenting out the osx layer and restarting the problem resolves.

[theckman]

@paultopia The environment variables may be it. My issue was the same as @hooleyhoop described, my shell was talking awhile to start. I've dramatically reduced my startup time and now copying and pasting is working fine for me.

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