Lag in Typing in Yosemite's Mail w/ External Apple Keyboard

Now I'm wondering if they would bleep "Hades," with the red stuff or not.... [sigh]

Here's a shot an an explanation:

The space bar is just the same as any key. If you hit space and it doesn't show on screen, the space will show up at some later time. I've seen several characters appear after I hit space, and also when I hit command S.

The cursor jumping back is likely because you hit the delete key, but didn't see the delete take effect. When it does later, it looks like the cursor jumped back, especially if what it deletes is a space.

Klahane wrote:

Here's a shot an an explanation:

The space bar is just the same as any key. If you hit space and it doesn't show on screen, the space will show up at some later time. I've seen several characters appear after I hit space, and also when I hit command S.

The cursor jumping back is likely because you hit the delete key, but didn't see the delete take effect. When it does later, it looks like the cursor jumped back, especially if what it deletes is a space.

A reasonable shot, but I'm a writer and nothing has changed in my typing (60wpm?...) in the last day or so. Something really profound seems to be happening with Mail. It's communicating so poorly with the keyboard as to be unusable. And the cursor is jumping back without me ever being anywhere near the delete key. Just typing normally.

The MBP I'm on shipped with 10.9 and I never ran the beta 10.10 on here. I waited till Yosemite went golden on the public release and then installed. I'm not running a bare bones system, but both this MBP and the brand new Mac mini at work have pretty much the same software on them, and definitely the exact same setup with Mail. It shipped with 10.10, but I still migrated stuff from 10.8 onto there. It runs without a hitch, the MBP is horrible on Mail

There is one odd anomaly that I haven't researched yet regarding the copy of mail on each. When I right click on my mailboxes (all IMAP) on the Mac mini, I get an option to "Erase Junk Mail," that I don't get on the MBP. I only get "Erase Deleted Messages" on the MBP. Pretty much the same email accounts on each, with one less Gmail account on the MBP. Anybody know why this is? ARE there different versions of 10.10.1 out there?

Cheers,

Mick

compare your settings in both mail apps (Preferences>Accounts). probably all that is... apple replaced my hard drive (AND ram, AND logic board LOL) several months ago, so am on a clean-installed 10.10.1. and the lag just started one day, maybe a month ago. and (as i've posted earlier), does not happen in a test user os x account. so something with mail and my user account (i assume). it's such a disruptive issue, apple needs to sort it out already...

Thank you for the important clarification about the space bar being "just another key."

This morning as i was composing an email, I realized that the delay is like digital stuttering because I tend to hit the missing letter again when it doesn’t appear the first time. Thus when the input word does appear, it has multiples of that letter I repeated. For example, after I type "Mac" in an email and only "Ma" appears, I keep hitting the "c" so the word finally appears as "Maccc".

Since we now have a higher level Apple Tech looking into the problem, I thought this insight might be useful. It also explains why I originally thought the keyboard on my 2011 Macbook Pro was failing.

somehow font-related? i just typed a lot of letters with no spaces or returns, and no lag. when i started incorporating spaces, and return...the lag was back. trying to type a bunch of spaces brought the lag as well. hmm....

Just chiming in here to say that this is absolutely getting worse on both my Macs (external keyboards have nothing to do with it). It's as if the app is literally dying before my eyes, and with it, all respect for Apple... I've been using Macs since '84. I used to write for several Mac websites (Applelinks, MacAddict, MyMac). I know what I'm doing, all my apps and hardware are in top condition, I update the OS every single time just like I always told the world to do, and I have never seen such idiocy as this.

Dumbing down Pages (as if real writers would rather do professional work on their freaking PHONES!) comes close, but at least that works. Apple Mail is like a cockroach that's ingested just a little bit of poison. Tremble, twitch-twitch, soon the whole thing's on its back, its little mailbox legs a-jerking in the air.

Lol, pretty funny, well stated. I think an in-depth article on one of those blogs about this problem linking this thread might be a good way to make some productuve noise!

TaosJohn wrote:

Just chiming in here to say that this is absolutely getting worse on both my Macs (external keyboards have nothing to do with it). It's as if the app is literally dying before my eyes, and with it, all respect for Apple... I've been using Macs since '84. I used to write for several Mac websites (Applelinks, MacAddict, MyMac). I know what I'm doing, all my apps and hardware are in top condition, I update the OS every single time just like I always told the world to do, and I have never seen such idiocy as this.

Dumbing down Pages (as if real writers would rather do professional work on their freaking PHONES!) comes close, but at least that works. Apple Mail is like a cockroach that's ingested just a little bit of poison. Tremble, twitch-twitch, soon the whole thing's on its back, its little mailbox legs a-jerking in the air.

TJ, I completely agree. [Although I find the Kafka reference too visceral for my tastes] I use Mail all day long and now that I'm back at work on the unaffected 2014 Mac mini, it makes me loathe to return to the disintegrating version running on my MBP. I've tried to stay abreast of the thread here, but it looks like no one has really identified a workable workaround, right? Other than typing in TextEdit? And no one has truly identified a common denominator?

Mick

Oh no!

There has been no improvement in my Mac's Mail delay and, as other people have reported, it seems to be getting worse.

But what could be worse is that, I have just written my first lengthy e-mail on my new (to me) iPad Air and there were three moments when I thought I had not touched the keyboard properly (I'm still getting used to it) only for a flurry of letters to suddenly appear a couple of seconds later.

I don't know much about how the iPad system works but there was only one other app in the background at the time and that was idle, as far as I could tell.

I hope this was a temporary blip and unrelated.

can some of you try this? type a lot of letters with no spaces and no return? seems to work well here. as soon as i hit return...lag. and spaces seem to create an issue as well. try typing a bunch of spaces together... or maybe i'm hallucinating. i keep trying things 😎

Seems that returns and spaces do trigger more lags, but typing only a string of regular characters, it still happens for me.

hmm. i just tried this again. typed a long string of text, and no lag. once i started typing a bunch of spaces, and hitting return...lag. ok, so maybe not an actual lead, but... i keep trying. i HATE that i can't figure it out, i've always been able to work out my mac challenges. 😮

I still get the lag even if I'm just typing nonsense with the home row. (I can't actually type without using the space bar because I'm a touch typist.) Maybe I got a few more characters typed in this manner than regular typing, but I can't tell.

It's important to keep in mind that this problem is intermittent. Sometimes I get a whole paragraph typed and see no delays. Other times, I see an obvious delay in a few words.

While testing no-space typing, I eliminated one other possible culprit. I noticed that I couldn't type repeated characters by holding down the key, and remembered the addition of a popup for characters that have accented versions. I turned that off, logged out and back in, and still saw the typing delay. The easiest way to toggle this feature on and off is with TinkerTool (requires logging out and back in), but there's a Terminal command as well. (TinkerTool likely just has the Terminal command toggle coded in.)

So the accented character popup feature does not seem to affect the typing delay in Mail. (That makes sense, because that's a system-wide feature.)

i HATE that i can't figure it out, i've always been able to work out my mac challenges.

In this case, there's an actual bug. At least it sure looks like it's not a matter of a few people with weird preferences set or some weird third-party utility or kext or some leftover launch daemon or even the mythical "cruft."

I would be convinced that the problem goes away in a new user account if someone set one up and stayed working in that account for a week or so with lots of Mail usage. Doing a test for only a few minutes isn't going to give us an answer because the problem is too intermittent. Lots of proposed solutions seem to last even as long as a day or so.