Arch Linux

starling000

Member

Registered: 2015-05-08

Posts: 4

Terminals (xterm, gnome-terminal) lagging behind keyboard input

Hey, so, I've just gone through building my first arch environment. So far, it's been mostly successful, although i've had to learn the hard way that I can't expect package groups to include all sorts of bells and whistles like in other distros.

Right now, the only hiccup that I can't iron out is that terminal emulators, such as xterm and gnome terminal, seem to be having some sort of input lag problem. it'll accept my input but it will frequently fail to update the display with the last character i entered unless i let it sit there for a few seconds. It sounds small, but it's intensely frustrating when you can type almost 80 words per minute! I'm not having this problem in the raw terminal, and i'm not experiencing any other sort of display lag. Right now I'm in a gnome desktop and all the compositing is smooth as silk, so I can't imagine it's a GPU or driver issue.

Any suggestions on how I can iron this out?

Wilco

Member

Registered: 2008-11-09

Posts: 440

Re: Terminals (xterm, gnome-terminal) lagging behind keyboard input

Might be related to Gnome. You can install a small window manager like fluxbox or icewm that doesn't need a lot of dependencies to test it out.

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 7,732

Website

Re: Terminals (xterm, gnome-terminal) lagging behind keyboard input

As you type in the terminal, have another terminal window open & running this command:

journalctl -xf

See if any errors are written to the journal when it lags.

EDIT: Does that make sense?

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2015-05-08 21:29:43)

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Are you infected with Wetiko?

starling000

Member

Registered: 2015-05-08

Posts: 4

Re: Terminals (xterm, gnome-terminal) lagging behind keyboard input

Might be related to Gnome. You can install a small window manager like fluxbox or icewm that doesn't need a lot of dependencies to test it out.

I know it's not that, at least, because it was doing the very same thing in Enlightenment and WindowMaker when I was trying those out.

I'd like to run the command above, but it seems I've run into a much more severe bug that's preventing me from even booting correctly. :S
so I'm going to see if I can get at my system log somehow from within this little windows partition I have for emergencies.

eduncan911

Member

Registered: 2015-05-02

Posts: 93

Website

Re: Terminals (xterm, gnome-terminal) lagging behind keyboard input

Very far-fected idea, as I ran into this today, but I'll mention here for you to lookup.

My GDM+Gnome setup has been working great using the gnome-terminal.  That was, until I started fluxing with the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

Under the [Device] section, I was attempting to get my GDM to auto-resize (it's inside a VM) and thought I'd be cute and enable a lot of the commented-out "Options" that was generated for my video card using "Xorg :2 -configure" (vmware was the device type).  Well, turns out I created a sever "input lag" but uncommenting a few of these "options." 

Reading up on X.org's vmware driver, I found I should not mess with the defaults:

http://www.x.org/archive/current/doc/ma … re.4.xhtml

I mention this, as x.org may have a similar page for your video driver and maybe you've touched your xorg.conf?