stutter.el

An emacs package to improve performance of emacs-based shells when outputting large amounts of text.

Description

When outputting large amounts of text (e.g., git log), emacs-based shells (e.g., eshell, shell, term) are unable to keep up. This is performance issue is primarily due to the cost of actually rendering the text to the screen (“redisplay”), only to scroll right past it.

Stutter solves this issue by repeatedly pausing redisplay in rapidly growing buffers. The downside is that such buffers appear to “stutter”. The upside is that commands like git log finish much faster.

Known Issues

• I’ve tested this in eshell and comint derived modes. This mode will attempt to hook into the after-change-functions hook in other buffers (when enabled), but that hasn’t been thoroughly tested.
• This mode relies on the buffer growing to decide when to “stutter”. It will stop not work properly if your shell has a scroll-back limit.
  • It should be possible to fix this by using marks and/or overlays to track text appended to the end of the buffer. Patches welcome.
• This mode will cause output to stutter…