Inform7 IDE Slow Editing on MacOS Catalina about inform HOT 6 CLOSED

I thought it might be a large block of ChangeLog notes that I kept in comment form in the file, but it wasn't that. I also thought I might have a tricky hanging bracket or quote that was making the file difficult, but it appears not.

It also appears to not be purely an issue of length, as I pasted in half of the text of Pride and Prejudice and noted only a small slow down. With the entire book, typing was considerably slower.

It appears that there are processes that happen after every keystroke whose rapidity is affected by the length/complexity of the text. That might be worth looking at, changing to a less frequent update, or only after a user has stopped typing for a period.

Would it help to try my source file?

from inform.

We noted on the forum that this only happens when syntax coloring is turned on.

Further profiling (thanks ArdiMaster, https://intfiction.org/t/inform7-ide-slow-editing/49086/22 ) indicates that a whole lot of time is spent in updateTextTouchBarItems. The problem is only observable on MacBook Pros with touchbar.

See screenshot:

from inform.

I'm pretty sure that the real problem is that when syntax coloring is on, the view's redisplay method is being called thousands of times per keystroke. The touchbar call itself is only marginally slow (a few milliseconds), but because it's called way too often, it beats the CPU to death.

from inform.

For additional feedback, I'm running "Version 1.68 (1.68.1)" on Big Sur (11.6) on an M1 Mac Mini and also encountering slow editing. My device doesn't have a touchbar, but there are still large lags on every keystroke, even on small files like the Onyx example.

from inform.

For a possible workaround in the latest version v1.82 (v10.1.2), see #28 (comment)

from inform.

This should be fixed now.

from inform.