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

Regarding the special characters function, this relates to what must to be one of the most bizarre of Apple's quirks in OS X; the option to enable key repeats without it actually being enabled within the OS itself without using Terminal.

However, it can be enabled/disabled using TinkerTool which can be downloaded from here:

http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

Oh.  I have another question.  How many of us have cats that sometimes walk on our keyboards at night and leave us with puzzles to solve the following morning??  I'm starting to wonder if the cats landed on some goofy key-combination that hosed things up. 

So can somebody point me at the place to turn off that character-substitution function?

As another poster pointed out, TinkerTool is the tool of choice here.

TinkerTool > General > Keyboard > Support key repeat or Hold key to select diacritic characters

I played around with that early on, and got text-display delay in Mail with either setting if I remember correctly. But it's worth a try.

This UI behavior, by the way, is related to the way you do it in iOS. As far as I know, there's never been a really good way to get diacritic characters.

I've been using PopChar for about 25 years (although PopChar X has only been around since 2002) and I have become so accustomed to it that Apple's solution is extremely invasive for me.

You know what, I have a brand new MacBookPro 15" retina display (2 months old), loaded to the hill.  I have none of the third party apps listed in this discussion.  I am using the MacBook keyboard.  I have the delay, doesn't matter if its a magic mouse, or my logistic, or my track pad.  Some days not a problem, others like today, real bad.  I don't see the issue on other apps.

The problem is in OSX, that's my take, period.

Switched the keyboard from "hold key to select diacritic characters" to "support key repeat" in Tinkertools and now I'll need to chug along for a few days before opining on whether it made a difference.  But here's another observation.  Just for grins I asked Tinkertools to set every option back to its default value (combating the "cat walking on keyboard making weird system changes" possibility).  When I did that, the default setting was diacritic-characters, not key-repeat which surprised me a bit.  My wife's machine (which doesn't suffer from lag) defaults to key-repeat.  Have no theory on why that would be.  Our MBPro's are very similar (age, version of OSX, configuration, etc.).

As far as I know, it won't make any difference to the lag, it hasn't on my Mac,

I just thought you wanted to get your repeat key function back which is why I posted the link to TinkerTool.

That is just weird!  I find it amazing all our Macs suffer from this ranging from 2010 to 2013, MBPs to nMac Pro.  None did with early versions of 10.10 as far as I can recall, it crept in later on I think but could be wrong.  It certainly wasn't there in 10.9.  It has to be the OS.  So far the tip about enabling slow keys has kept us sane.

I can't test as we both do real work on Macs at home but has anyone tried running sans internet connection.  Obviously you can't send Mail but you can create it.

I still run ML 10.8.5, and I can assure you that the issue is present here - it is IMO definitely the OS, and it crept in cross the board sometime in early fall '14. Most likely code is being reused in upgrades and security updates - that's why I see it was well.

Topher Kessler wrote an article on what might be a related issue including some ideas that might help here: Possible fix for Mail’s cursor moving when entering punctuation.

• First, go to Mail’s Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Check Spelling menu and change the setting to something different. The options of “Never” or “Before Sending” will turn off live checking of what you type; however, you can try any of these, or simply switch to a different one and then switch back, to see if they change the unwanted behavior.
• Next go to the Edit > Substitutions menu and uncheck all of the substitution options. If the problem stops, then re-enable them one-by-one to see if any results in the problem, and then only disable that substitution option.
• Finally, try going to the Apple menu and choosing System Preferences. In here, go to the Text section of the Keyboard system preferences, where you will see a list of custom auto-corrections and spelling settings. If you have any substitutions listed with a text string in the “Replace” column but with an empty string in the “With” column, then remove this entry as it will automatically delete the words you enter. In addition, try using the spelling settings to disable spelling services, and choose a specific (and relevant) language for spell checking.
• Beyond these issues, this problem may be related to a similar one caused by odd character encodings used in Mail, so you might follow the instructions in this past article to ensure your Mail text encoding is correct.

I did everything in Topher's article, including the changes recommended in his past article. Didn't help. In fact the lag seems to be worse after the changes. I'm tired of fighting this battle and am going back to Postbox.

Phil

pdavis42: have you tried the 'slow keys' thing? that fix continues to work here, am staying with that for now (and glad NOT to have to move to another mail app).

Yes. I've tried the slow keys and everything else that has been suggested. The "slow keys" fix does seem to work, but the affect it has on my other work is not acceptable. I've used Postbox at various times in the past and it works well. I can easily return to Apple Mail when it becomes healthy again.

Phil

Fixed -- thank you R Meyer!! This has been a really annoying bug. As soon as I switched on Accessibility -> Slow Keys, the problem was fixed.

Of course, the keyboard repeat rate was then very slow....

But I fixed that too: after a bit of searching I found a program called Karabiner.app which lets you tweak the auto-repeat settings. I cranked down the delay settings there, and my auto-repeat is now back to its fast self, and the Mail.app typing lag is still gone. 'Slow Keys' is still turned on, but Karabiner must override them. (And OK, the auto-repeat is not perfect -- it's a bit jerky -- but it's a whole lot better than the default 'Slow Keys.')

Experiencing the same issue in Outlook. Definitely slowing down my correspondence.

I'm noticing that not only is there a lag in response from my wireless keyboard, but the cursor also magically ends up in a random location.