13 Mar 2009

XFCE terminal slowness

Ever since switching to xfce4 (and xfce-terminal), terminal has been incredibly slow at redrawing itself. This happens when starting a new process, or shuffling the window in xmonad.

Finally I have found the culprit down the bottom of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
    Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

This nasty little fella was left over from my days of using compiz-fusion as a window manager. Apparently having compositing enabled makes xfce-terminal die in the arse when being re-rendered.

It now redraws instantly, as it should.