Repeated input by holding down key in Emacs

Question

How to lower/remove the delay, and speed up the insertion of additional keys on holding down a key?

For instance: if you want to type a long "ffffffffffffff" sequence, when you do not care how many f's exactly, it takes quite some time when holding down the f to get the result.

There is a quite long initial delay, and the speed of the f's appearing after the delay is not the fastest either. Does anyone know which parameters are involved, and how to alter them?

Is this not a function of the operating system / keyboard driver? My highly scientific testing gives similair results in emacs and gnome-terminal and xterm — Squidly, Aug 31 '12 at 12:31
try pressing C-u 64 f (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/?action=browse;oldid=UniversalArgument;id=PrefixArgument). And yes, that's probably not what you're looking for. — alex vasi, Aug 31 '12 at 12:35
@MrBones this is correct, I fixed it through windows. Case closed. — PascalVKooten, Aug 31 '12 at 14:22

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 31 '12 at 19:26

Key repeat settings are always controlled by the base operating system, which you didn't state. In the control panel or settings configuration for windows, osx, Linux, (and pretty much everything these days) there are two settings controlling key repeating. The first is how long the delay is until the repeating starts, and the second is how fast the repeating occurs.

On unix systems (ie, X-window based), there is also the xset command line tool which can be used to change the keyrepeat:

# xset -h
... help output ...
To turn auto-repeat off or on:
    -r [keycode]        r off
     r [keycode]        r on
     r rate [delay [rate]]

And, as someone said, in emacs it's actually faster to insert a bunch of random characters by simply using ctrl-u followed by your random number and then hitting the key. Or, in fact, you can use alt-6 alt-4 f as well.

(yes it's technically meta in emacs, but your key is likely labeled alt)

Repeated input by holding down key in Emacs

1 Answers1