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

Having removed com.apple.mail and replaced it because it disabled Dockstar, I replaced it and Dockstar still did not work or even appear in Mail preferences - so I had to reinstall it and then reset all of Mail's and Dockstar's preferences.

However, the lag appears to have gone but I have been left with an insertion point which strays forwards so that if I want to go back and edit text, I have to place the insertion point one or more spaces ahead of where I want to type.

I don't know what is more annoying.

Actually, I do. Apple's aloof approach to problems like this where mere mortals are left to stab in the dark for possible solutions.

OK, I'm sticking my neck out here.

A few days ago, after my last post, I was getting sick of the wandering insertion point problem and thought back on how I had dealt with a similar problem in the distant past and remembered clearing my font cache - there are a few utilities which do this.

Anyway, this is where I stick my neck out, having stumbled my way through adlerasc's procedure:

1) Quitting mail

2) Going the user library folder, the going to containers.

3) I threw out com.apple.mail

and then undone it because it messed up Dockstar - then cleared the font cache, I haven't had a lag in typing using Mail for three days.

Cue the return of my Mail lag...

Where is the font cache?

astone8122 wrote:

Where is the font cache?

I've not tried these recently, so use at your own risk. I would also recommend a reboot be done after any of these.

From Adobe:

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later

• Close all applications.
• Launch Terminal
• Enter the following command at the prompt and press Return: atsutil databases -removeUser
• Enter the following command at the prompt and press Return: atsutil databases -shutdown
• Enter the following command at the prompt and press Return: atsutil databases -ping
• Quit Terminal

Or use a utility like FontNuke.

The FontNuke FAQ gives a list of everywhere you might find a font cache, should you prefer to do it manually.

To be honest, I don't think that deleting the font cache cured the typing lag, I think that something else did, but deleting the font cache cured a problem which the thing that may have cured the typing lag had also caused; i.e. the insertion point being in the wrong place.

Deleted all Font caches using TinkerTool System, this seemed to help for an hour or so, but the lag is back.

• iMac (27-inch, Late 2009)
• OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 (14C109)
• 3,06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 16 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
• ATI Radeon HD 4670 256 MB

This thread is long … I’m not sure I haven’t missed things here — has it been checked already whether Mail plugins could contribute to the problem? Stuff like Mail Act-On, MailTags, Mail Perspectives, MailHub, MsgFiler, QuoteFix or others (just to name a few whose names I know)?

Yep, I tried deleting the font cache as well. No effect.

I'm pretty sure there's no common use of a mail plug in. Just out of curiosity -- are we all using s/MIME certificates? That's the only addition I have to standard Mail?

I wanted to remove all sources of customization from the problem that I could. So I made a bootable USB flash drive with a fresh copy of Yosemite on it. It was entirely factory defaults except Mail, and I set up only a single GMail account on it. The lag was present even with this very vanilla setup. No external keyboard, no Mail plug-ins, no special fonts, none of the other stuff that commenters on this thread have mentioned.

i am sure it's in the home library somewhere. when i tried a virgin account on my mac, and setup mail there, there was NO lag. either way, it's unbelievable that apple is leaving us this long with the problem; i've got "slow keys" on most of the time now...a nuisance, but better than nothing. c'mon apple!

Wow! 33 pages in this thread. I tried reading them all but I just could not. So please excuse me if I am repeating what someone else has posted.

I tried the following and they did not work:

1. changing Mail's message font to Helvetica Neue
2. Unchecking "Highlight messages with color when not grouped" in Mail prefs.

However, this has appeared to fix it for me in my limited testing. In the account settings for the IMAP account I was creating the new email in and typing, I turned off "Store draft messages on the server" in Mailbox behaviors.

I hope this really is the fix.

Good luck all!

not for me; am on a pop account. the only thing that works (for now) is turning on 'slow keys' in the Accessibilities System Pref (not my discovery, btw). a minor nuisance, but at least we can write emails in real time....

I think that all those suggestions have been made before apart from the 'Highlight message with color...' which took me a while to find.

I don't want to come over all smart-arse, especially as I am clueless how it has happened, but I have not experienced the lag for ten days but I now have the problem of the actual text insertion point drifting away from where the I beam is clicked or where it is displayed on screen. On balance, this is marginally preferable to the typing lag.

Alf Megson wrote:

I now have the problem of the actual text insertion point drifting away from where the I beam is clicked or where it is displayed on screen.

Some seem to have verified this as a font issue. Either duplicate or corrupted fonts. Open Font Book, choose "All Fonts", select the first one and <Command>-A to select all then "Validate Font" from the File menu. Work through any issues found. It used to occur randomly for awhile, but I haven't seen it in some time now.

Thanks for the reply.

As is often the case, after posting something about a problem, I am minded to address it once more with vigour and I found that quite a few people had solved the problem by changing the Message Font from Helvetica to anything else. I tried this and it works.

I normally use Suitcase for font management but for the past few weeks I have not had it running in order to eliminate it as a suspect but just ran Font Book as suggested. Helvetica (along with 49/578 fonts came up with minor (but unspecified) problems. Over the past 30 years working in graphic design, I have learned that font problems are an occupational hazard and not as easily resolved as they might be for somebody whose work is not so font centred and that Helvetica, along with all its iterations and types, is probably the most problematic (if not popular) font of all time - though I remember Gill Sans being a major headache in the 90s.

Anyway, my wandering insertion point problem seems to be resolved. It's perhaps a bit odd that Helvetica came up earlier in the thread but perhaps I should stress, lest anybody misreads my post, that I am not saying that changing the message font from Helvetica fixes the type lag problem; it doesn't.

I am also experiencing this issue in Mail, Safari, iMessage, and other Mac applications. I have noticed that when I am using my bluetooth speaker to play music, the lag is significantly worse. When I turn the speaker off, the keyboard works fine. I am using a Bose SoundLink Mini. All of my equipment is relatively new and up to date. Has anyone else had this issue related to bluetooth "traffic"?