Love the editor (using it for hardware development in Verilog) but it’s quite slow compared to other editors I’ve tried… even when working on extremely small files.
Are there any features that I could disable to see a boost in performance?
Thanks,
-Adam
I would start with https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/revert.html you may have installed a package, which slows down your installation. You can install new packages and check, whether ST slows down. It is slow compared to which editors?
Yeah it was fresh install so the only plugins I have are the ones to support Verilog/SystemVerilog:
https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SystemVerilog
In the past I’ve been using gnome’s built-in editor or emacs so I have only those to compare against thus far.
That package has quite a big auto completion (here). You could try to disable it by opening the SystemVerilog settings Preferences > Package Settings > SystemVerilog > Settings - User and set sv.disable_autocomplete to true
{
"sv.disable_autocomplete": true
}
Interesting… even after setting that to true and restarting ST, the feature is still enabled.
But even before I installed that plugin, in general editing text seemed a bit slower.
Oh sorry you need to set it into your normal user settings Preferences > Settings.
If it is not performant enough without any additional package installed I don’t know how to improve that. I would be suprised if it was less performant than Emacs.
Two things missing from this discussion is what version you’re using and on what platform, and what your perception of slowness is based on, eg: opening or navigating files, scrolling text, etc.
Good point. I’m using the very latest version of sublime text 3 on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64).
I’m comparing performance mainly by text entry delay (time it takes for a character to show up one I press a key), moving through the document with the arrow keys, and selecting portions of text with the mouse, etc.
Yes that’s correct. I have an emacs session and an gnome editor session open and am comparing the response times between the 3. It’s really noticeable when you hit pgUp or pgDwn or selecting text using the mouse. Recording a video now to show what I mean. Picture is worth a thousand words… 
Ok here’s my test. 4 editors tested and Sublime is definitely the slowest. Unusable I’m afraid. 
Emacs may be the fastest actually…
If I am correct you are using a remote connection to an other PC and start ST there?
Correct. I’m connecting to a SuSe machine via a nomachine connection. We have a ridiculously fast connection here at work though, and I can say that all of the other applications we use (some very gui intensive) work very fast.
AFAIK Sublime Text is slow over remote connections, because it implements a lot of the gui stuff on its own and uses less the default functions. I think this setup is not really a use case for ST.
yeah it’s non-trivial for remote desktop apps to determine which areas were repainted, so they tend to resend and redraw the entire window on every frame…
Interesting… I haven’t seen a speed issue on any other software I use remotely. And I’m using full semiconductor chip debug and layout tools. Very graphically intensive. Moreso than ST.
Do they have animation they are drawing? You could try changing the cursor to not blink and see if that helps.
Do you have the option of running Sublime locally and then mounting the remote filesystem via sshfs or the like?
To @r-stein and @kingkeith’s points, SublimeText uses its own platform-independent windowing layer and things like Emacs etc. can take advantage of the fact they were built on and for slow terminal and X11 connections and use X11’s higher-level functionality, which was designed for your use case. Also, the graphical applications that seem so much faster to you have different psychology regarding what constitutes a feeling of latency, so that’s an apples-to-salamanders comparison.