[TxMt] Chunked undo, Language, overall slowness

[Allan Odgaard]

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

> 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.

Indeed, there are many. And NSTextView has speed related problems as  
well, generally much more serious than TM. I did:

  % dd 2>/dev/null count=10000 if=/dev/random|xxd|tm

And TM showed the ~20 MB file after ~3 seconds, and I could edit it.  
TextEdit shows the file instantly, but as soon as I do something,  
it's busy for ~60s, and resizing the window cause a similar long  
stall in TextEdit.

> 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.

I was pretty frustrated myself when I switched to OS X (over the  
general sluggishness), and I'm a tad irritated by the many hoops I  
have to go through, to get decent performance on low-end system  
(which seems to be most below a 2.5 GHz G5 with AGPx8 ;) ).

But OTOH I've also changed my view on these things, make it work,  
then make it fast, I think that's what Apple does, and it's a  
philosophy I've adopted myself -- TM is far more dynamic than any  
other text editor, and makes much more use of “declarative” rules  
than code/plugins, and I think that adds tremendous value, despite  
the overhead these things bring.