I upgraded to xdm-1.1.0 and it has become painfully slow. It seems to have a delay of a fraction of a second (maybe 30ms, obviously longer than a screen refresh). If I mistype my username and then attempt to erase it by holding down the backspace key until my username is completely erased, the text cursor then flashes repeatedly for a while at the left margin, which I think is because it was not keeping up with the autorepeat rate of the backspace key and is then slowly processing the other backspace characters! If I have entered a lot of characters into the user name field (for example, by accidentally leaving something on the keyboard), it takes a long time to backspace over them. Also, this version of xdm apparently does not let me use the mouse to select a ranger of characters and delete them, so using the backspace key is the only way to fix the problem. xdm-1.1 also attempts to redraw the text cursor for each character of the password that I enter, even though nothing is being echoed.
This is the downside of the attempt to make sure there was visible feedback when typing by flashing the text cursor - it clearly needs some improvement. (And no version of xdm I've ever seen has allowed selecting text with a mouse cursor - since xdm uses direct Xlib calls instead of a canned widget for the text entry, it would take a bit of work to add mouse selection support.)
It appears that this problem persists in xdm-1.1.1.
It appears that this problem persists in xdm-1.1.3. It appears to me that this "downside of the attempt to make sure there was visible feedback when typing by flashing the text cursor" outweighs the benefit, so the original patch that caused the problem should be reverted until such time as this "donwside" is fixed or at least the trade-off is positive. I invite anyone who thinks the trade-off was positive on balance to explain here.
Yes, I'm planning to make the added feedback configurable and set it off in the default configuration, but haven't gotten a chance to get to it yet.
Fix committed to git, will be included shortly in xdm-1.1.4 release: commit 450e9eb2725be6ead1c6d3e5477b737ded04070b Author: Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith@sun.com> Date: Thu Feb 1 15:23:12 2007 -0800 Bug #8561: xdm painfully slow at cursor redraws <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8561> Made code that waited for cursor redraws to appear onscreen conditional on FORCE_CURSOR_FLASH #define, which is off by default. (If someone wants to make this runtime configurable instead of build-time, patches will be gratefully accepted.)
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