[TxMt] performance ceiling

[Allan Odgaard]

On 2/5/2006, at 0:32, Oliver Taylor wrote:

> [...] It seems like I'm hitting some kind of performance ceiling  
> when typing
> in lines with more than 400 characters [...] Is TextMate ill- 
> equipted to handle lines this long or is my machine messed up?  
> Anyone else out there see this same thing? Any suggestions?

Performance for line editing is proportional with the length of the  
line.

When a line is edited, the entire line needs to be re-parsed for  
syntax highligthing (and will be read-only, i.e. stall if you edit)  
until it’s done. The entire line will be re-spell checked (if you  
have spell checking enabled), and the spell checker seems to have  
performance trouble on slower systems, the entire line will need to  
be relayouted (even though it’s fixed width fonts, yes) and redrawn,  
unless you enable soft wrap, and that is slow as well.

So to reach optimal performance (or experiment with it), one would  
disable spell check as you type, enable soft wrap, and switch to  
Plain Text as language. I have ordered them in assumed most-to-least  
gain.