urxvtd performance problems and possible fixes

[Reuben Thomas]

I've been using urxvtd for a bit now, and I've noticed two situations in 
which life gets rather more painful than it would in the old (separate 
process) days:

1. I do something with a Perl extension that takes a long time. I can't use 
any of my terminal windows until it finishes.

2. I change the size of the text in a window with a long history. I can't 
use any of my terminal windows until all the text in all the windows is 
reformatted.

These have slightly different solutions. The Perl pauses (e.g. searching in 
a large history for something that's not there) would go away if only I 
could interrupt them, but it seems I can't. I'm mainly thinking of searching 
in my history.

As to reformatting the text, it would be nice if this were done in the 
background: due to the way my window manager (ion) works, when I resize one 
window, I typically resize all of them, and poof! my computer's busy for the 
next few minutes reformatting all my command histories, and I can't use any 
of my terminals. I do like the reformatting, though I'd settle for being 
able to scroll left and right and turn off reformatting.

Finally, I noticed an English-o in the man page: "bidirectional algorithms 
belong into the application": into -> in.