/gempesaw/writing

Fixing a laggy compilation buffer

· emacs elisp compilation buffer compile.el compilation.el compilation-mode compilation-error-regexp-alist gmane

I use Emacs compilation mode to execute most of my scripts - it has a lot of nice built in things, including error highlighting with automatic navigation. But, I've noticed that with really long lines, the compliation buffer gets so slow that it makes Emacs unresponsive to input, and I end up having to frantically Ctrl+G and hope that I can stop the compilation before I lose Emacs and have to Force Quit it.

One particular instance is when I'm using Webdriver to take screenshots - Webdriver takes the screenshot (in binary format?) and base64 encodes it, so that means I've got a very long string to work with, and if I accidentally print it out, Emacs gets quite overwhelmed.

As usual, I'm not the only one to run into this issue, and there's a gmane.emacs.bugs thread (cache) about disabling the Maven regular expression in the compilation-error-mode-alist:

(setq compilation-error-regexp-alist
      (delete 'maven compilation-error-regexp-alist))

I had thought it had to do with colorization, or perhaps the rainbow delimiters that I use, but that simple line of disabling the Maven regex made a huge difference. Hooray for correcting long-standing annoyances.