Question

Some types of events have the potential to fire rapidly, many times in a row (the "mousemove" and "scroll" events, for example). When handling such events, you must be careful not to do anything too time-consuming or your handler will take up so much time that interaction with the document starts to feel slow and choppy.

If you do need to do something nontrivial in such a handler, you can use setTimeout to make sure you are not doing it too often. This is usually called debouncing the event. There are several slightly different approaches to this.

In the first example, we want to do something when the user has typed something, but we don’t want to do it immediately for every key event. When they are typing quickly, we just want to wait until a pause occurs. Instead of immediately performing an action in the event handler, we set a timeout instead. We also clear the previous timeout (if any) so that when events occur close together (closer than our timeout delay), the timeout from the previous event will be canceled.

<textarea>Type something here...</textarea>
<script>
  var textarea = document.querySelector("textarea");
  var timeout;
  textarea.addEventListener("keydown", function() {
    clearTimeout(timeout);
    timeout = setTimeout(function() {
      console.log("You stopped typing.");
    }, 500);
  });
</script>

Giving an undefined value to clearTimeout or calling it on a timeout that has already fired has no effect. Thus, we don’t have to be careful about when to call it, and we simply do so for every event.

We can use a slightly different pattern if we want to space responses so that they’re separated by at least a certain length of time but want to fire them during a series of events, not just afterward. For example, we might want to respond to "mousemove" events by showing the current coordinates of the mouse, but only every 250 milliseconds.

<script>
  function displayCoords(event) {
    document.body.textContent =
      "Mouse at " + event.pageX + ", " + event.pageY;
  }

  var scheduled = false, lastEvent;
  addEventListener("mousemove", function(event) {
    lastEvent = event;
    if (!scheduled) {
      scheduled = true;
      setTimeout(function() {
        scheduled = false;
        displayCoords(lastEvent);
      }, 250);
    }
  });
</script>

This is a book about getting computers to do what you want them to do. Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but they contain a lot more hidden complexity and thus are harder to operate and understand. To many, they remain alien, slightly threatening things.