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Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

First "Core feature" for version 3: Speed.

I can't recall that I have ever felt that a text editor was "slow".

Try ST2 with a ton of plugins on an underpowered netbook one day ;) ...it wasn't "slow" like a big fat IDE can get, when you end up typing faster then text can show up on the screen, but it can still get "slow for an editor", like ">1s startup time", ">200ms to open a new tab" (yes, it's noticeable damn it, anything above 10ms if fking noticeable!) if some plugin tries to lint or spell check in the bg, etc.

As a plugin developer (sublimelint), it's far easier to make fast plugins in ST3. I had to do major hacks in ST2 to not block UI.

I'm really glad to hear this since as far as I could diagnose it, sublimelint was probably the biggest contributor to my ST's slowness :) ...but it's a great plugin to have, so kudos and keep up the good work!

Opening ST2 in windows was always very slow for me. This new version is much, much faster.

Just opening was ok for me. Loading files of more than a mb or two on the other hand was just simply terrible.

I don't run many plugins with ST2, so I haven't noticed much issue.

That said, I feel odd about this being a primary upgrade point. Speed improvements to me indicate that there were speed issues (confirmed by others here). I read that as "bug," not "feature request." It almost feels like you're going to be paying $15/$30 for a patch in this instance.

Well, for example opening a "small" 20MB SQL file could lock my ST2 for minutes on my slow 8 core i7 with 8GB RAM. For comparizon, Vim and Emacs could open 500MB SQL file in the same amount of time. And I'm not talking about saving, just opening.

I was editing JSHint - most of which is in a single 5000 line file - yesterday, with the same file open in split view, and was disappointed to see ST2 chugging a bit, with visible input lag.

In ST3, no such problems.

If you have a somewhat recent computer (Core 2 Duo or better?) it was probably caused by one of your plugins. It's pretty easy for a plugin to block the UI in ST2.

If you listen for on_modified as a plugin and do any work, the next keystroke won't appear until you return from on_modified. Multiply that across many plugins, some of which don't care about speed, and your editor becomes very slow.

It's simple, Sublime 2 starts after 2 or 3 seconds, sublime 3 starts in less than a half second, 3 seconds don't seem like a lot, but could you imagine every program you have starting in less than a second? It would be a really different experience.

I started using Linux on a machine with a 386 and 4 megs (yes, megs) of ram. Emacs was, I must admit, a bit slow on it, so I used jed until I got a better computer.

I scoffed until I tried it. Now I can't go back.

It's stuff like plugins not being able to block the UI thread rather than raw speed, as I understand it.

You have obviously never opened a 200MB xml file in Sublime Text :)

Notepad++ is a lot quicker for those.

Sublime Text 2 start-up time increased significantly after I installed Haskell support package.

Then you haven't tried jEdit :)

jEdit was basically my first introduction to powerful text editors while learning programming and Lilypond. It had some nice plugins/macros for text processing. But, yeah, it was so slow that eventually I moved to Notepad++ for basic text viewing/editing. Recently I decided to give ST2 a try and am very pleased with its speed and features. Right now I'm trying unlearn a few Notepad++ shortcuts that I occasionally misapply to ST2. Having jEdit load on startup helps a bit with the slowness.

install vcs-gutter plugin on ST2 and see the true retard :)

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