Switched back to cygwin EMACS from EMACS for win32

Haojun Bao baohaojun@gmail.com
Tue Jun 23 11:13:00 GMT 2009


(This is not a bug report for cygwin or Emacs, it's more like a story).

Long time ago, I used old cygwin EMACS, 21.x version, but I found it
crashes now and then, so I struggled til I found native EMACS 23
beta is provided at (*)

(*) http://ourcomments.org/cgi-bin/emacsw32-dl-latest.pl.

I went very far (to myself at least) by googling around for solutions
with stuff like cygwin-mount.el, TRAMP/pscp/plink, w32-symlinks.el,
gnuserv, visemacs (for Visual Studio), and by writing
some scripts/helper programs myself. It was fun and the result is quite
satisfactory.

But then recently I found a very annoying thing. I switched to use
GNUS/nnimap to read mail from GMail. It was very slow, so I googled
around and found a solution: use offlineimap and dovecot (**). I have
installed andLinux for running these.

(**) http://sachachua.com/wp/2008/05/08/geek-how-to-use-offlineimap-and-the-dovecot-mail-server-to-read-your-gmail-in-emacs-efficiently/

But it was still very SLOW! The `imap read: nnnnk' is running like a
stopwatch. I set up Thunderbird to test, and it can download the same
mail (about 1M) instantly.

I used Procexp (***) and found out EmacsW32 is reading output from
OpenSSL about 64K/sec. I googled again (with keywords `pipe 64k win32')
and assume this is some Win32/DOS compatibility thing? Anyhow,
cygwin-1.7 comes with Emacs23, so I just switched back and was happy
again:-) 

(***) http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/ProcessExplorer.zip

Thanks to you all cygwin developpers!

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