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

I've been restarting Mail pretty routinely when the lag starts.  For a while I thought that was the ticket, but now that I'm watching it really carefully I've occasionally noticed the lag even when Mail has just been restarted.

To track down one more point, I ran Verify on all my fonts. A number had yellow triangles. That's probably understandable as I've probably collected fonts over many years.

One said "Don't Use." That was Helvetica RO. That seemed mildly suspicious to me, but I've been using Helvetica Neue in Mail as a default.

I removed all fonts that were marked either way.

I also ran a demo of Font Doctor. It didn't flag any of the fonts that Font Book flagged, but did flat a bunch of others. The demo is pretty much useless, but I manually moved all the ones Font Doctor said had bad file structures.

Again, this may take days to test.

i cleaned up my fonts early on, AND changed the default font to a more-common one...and this had no effect here...

OK, time for some new theories.  I did a line for line comparison of the com.apple.mail.plist files on Marcie's computer and mine.  I found several "interesting" keys that I decided to play around with.

AddInvitationsToICalAutomatically -- is set to "true" (string = 1) in mine, "false" in Marcie's.  So I changed that one to false.  I think this is a red herring, but I'm putting it in here as documentation.

Here are the two that I'm kinda interested in:

WebAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled -- This key exists in my settings, does not in Marcie's.  It was set to "false" in mine, but I went ahead and deleted the whole key

WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -- THIS is the one I'm really interested in.  It existed in my settings, but not Marcie's.  It was also set to "true" in mine.  Again, I deleted the whole key.

Searching on WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled came up with a bunch of hits, all of which kinda point to the my latest cracked-brain theory.  I'm wondering if this WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled gizmo is actually *going out on the network* to do its spell-checking and replacement stuff.  That might explain why I find that the lag is worse at "busy" times of the day -- like around 8 or 9am Central time.

Anybody get to this theory before I did?  I'll circle back around after a day or so and give you a report.  If you want to try these on your own, here are the commands I used (no warranty express or implied).  I'd be curious to see if anybody else even has these settings in their preferences.  The first person who tries to read that WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled setting and finds that they don't have this key will blow up this theory.  ;-)

defaults read com.apple.mail AddInvitationsToICalAutomatically                       (what's up with this setting?)

1        (which means "true" in Settings Land)

defaults write com.apple.mail AddInvitationsToICalAutomatically -string "0"      (sets that value to "false)

defaults read com.apple.mail AddInvitationsToICalAutomatically                        (checks to see if it worked)

0        (it did)

 

defaults read com.apple.mail WebAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled      (what's up with this setting?)

0       (it's false -- but since Marcie's settings don't have this key at all, I'll delete the whole key)

defaults delete com.apple.mail WebAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled     (command delete the whole key)

defaults read com.apple.mail WebAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled        (check to make sure it's gone)

2015-02-05 17:36:42.334 defaults[6314:112885]

The domain/default pair of (/Users/blah/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences/com.app le.mail, WebAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled) does not exist       (these three lines mean that it's gone -- which is what I want)

 

 

 

 

defaults read com.apple.mail WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled         (what's up with this setting?)

1       (it's true -- but since Marcie's settings don't have this key at all, I'll delete the whole key)

defaults delete com.apple.mail WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled       (command delete the whole key)

defaults read com.apple.mail WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled         (check to make sure it's gone)

2015-02-05 17:36:42.334 defaults[6314:112885]

The domain/default pair of (/Users/blah/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences/com.app le.mail, WebAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled) does not exist         (these three lines mean that it's gone -- which is what I want)

Quite a while ago, I mentioned that sometimes when I got the lag, I had noticed that as there was a momentary SBBoD, there was also a momentary flash of a menu bar item (like when one uses a keyboard shortcut) and I wasn't sure which one it was. It was either File or Edit but it was always out of the corner of my eye.

Well, maybe the good news is that just now I saw which one it was quite clearly, it was File. There are only 10 menu items with shortcuts under File and most of them are quite clearly not being invoked at that moment as the action being commanded does not occur; i.e. New Message, Open Message, Close, Print etc. would all cause something visible to happen on screen. The only possible item from the File menu which could be invoked without its action being seen is Save.

It's interesting, therefore, that some people have reported that manually saving their e-mails has given some respite from the problem because what they may have been doing is triggering the cause of the lag at the moment they manually saved and as it is very unlikely (if not near impossible) that anybody could manually save and type at the same time, they would not actually see the effect in that instant.

frustrating. I could no longer scroll in iTunes either. It would just garble all the texts and make it unreadable.

As I just posted to the OP, 10.10.3 just might have fixed it.  So far so good, typing away all night.  Fingers crossed.

Anybody running 10.10.3 today signed an NDA not to reveal anything about it, including it's very existence.

My bad, very sorry.  After reading AI article discussing so much about this release I got carried away.  Won't happen again.

I talked to AppleCare today for about 40 minutes on this issue.

I have a mid-2014 MBP, 2 months old, OS X 10.10.2.  No extra typing add-ons, etc. as have been discussed here.

First we tried creating a new user account.  I logged in to the new user, created a mail account using the same settings as my normal account and tried typing an email, the lag was gone.

Logged back into my regular account the lag was back.  I was moved up to a higher level tech, who had me backup my mail folder at ==> "~/Library/Mail/V2" to the desktop and delete the ~/Library/Mail/V2 folder.  I also exported my mailbox from within Mail ==>  "Mailbox/Export Mailbox..."  to the desktop.

I rebooted and started up mail, tested the typing lag, and it was gone.  I shut down mail, moved the V2 folder back to the ~/Library/Mail folder and imported the "INBOX.mbox" file from the previous export back into Mail ==>"File/Import Mailboxes..."

So far no more lag . .

The Apple tech was pretty perplexed about the entire episode and has given me his contact information to keep him posted on any changes.

I can't say for sure if this is a permanent fix, and will try to chime in again in a few days or if and when the lag shows up again.

Curious to see if any of you want to give this a try, nothing real scientific here, just possibly some quirky good luck . .  stay tuned.

The bad news -- my crackpot theory didn't work.

The good news -- 10.10.3  :-)

Back to slow-keys, with a sharp eye on the "updates" indicator.  By the way, my cursor jumped back a paragraph (un-typed reverse line-feed character) just as I was typing this short note.  So the weirdness isn't restricted to Mail.  Just sayin'

Anybody running 10.10.3 today signed an NDA not to reveal anything about it, including it's very existence.

Why do you say that? 10.10.3 is being openly discussed on various blogs--for example Mac News Network--along with the first beta of Photos.

Here's an observation:

Mail has actually been pretty good for me for a couple of days. Today, I did notice some text-display delays. Then, looking closely, I thought I saw what I have to call mini delays. Some characters would appear just barely delayed. If I hadn't been looking closely, I wouldn't have noticed.

For the record, again, I have not seen text display delays in any other app.

I solved this problem by doing the following:

1) Quitting mail

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

3) I threw out com.apple.mail

Solved it for how long?

Quitting and restarting Mail will "solve" the problem for me, for some period of time. Then, like a bad penny, it always comes back.