[TxMt] Chunked undo, Language, overall slowness

[Sune Foldager]

On 05/09/2005, at 1.37, Steve Weintraub wrote:

> Sorry; I had looked in the archives, and saw first mention of this  
> back in February, so assumed that it had been implemented by now. I  
> hate to belabor this, but from what I've read in the archive, a lot  
> of people are asking for "normal" undo, so I hope its high up on  
> the todo list (if there is an ETA, that would be helpful to share).

Just to clarify: I'm not the developer, Allan is... that's why I put  
"I know" at the end ;-). I'm not sure how high up it is, actually.

>> Well, we are only human. There is a lot of parsing and layout and  
>> not to mention text layout (using ATSUI), which is actually quite  
>> slow on Mac. TextEdit and NSTextView in general have tons of  
>> optimizations in their code to cope with this. TextMate also does  
>> a good deal of caching here.
>
> HUMAN? How dare you! :)
> I don't know from ATSUI, but I assume there is a good reason you're  
> using it rather than TextEdit or NSTExtView, given what you  
> indicate are optimization compromises.

There are good reasons, I think mainly that NSTextView simply doesn't  
offer the features TextMate needs (as far as folding and such goes),  
but again Allan would be better to enumerate the reasons in exact.

> As a new user to TextMate (and having been in involved in number of  
> development projects), I can't help but bring the baggage of being  
> used to certain performance, behaviors and expectations from a Mac  
> application, so please forgive if I come off a bit frustrated.

Well, I've been complaining about TM performance from time to time as  
well, since I have an 'older' 1GHz G4 iMac ;-). It's certainly gotten  
better, due to more caching and various improvements here and there.  
I don't know about the rendering, but I think there is room for more  
peephole tweaks in the syntax system, which was a major slowdown here.

> btw-- how about making the Language label in the window a drop-down  
> menu to change language on the fly? :)

This is also on the TODO. General improvements of the status bar with  
more active elements, I believe :-).

-- Sune.