In my text editor, I just use a doubly linked list of lines, instead of a rope. It doesn't limit the performance in any situation I've found. A performance problem I do have is large column mode edits. eg if I want to delete the first columns of the entire file (typically some log file with timestamps at the start). I suspect the rope data structure would make that worse.

I like the simplicity of the doubly linked list of lines. I'm not sure what advantage the rope data structure would bring.