Sublime Forum

**njamesp** · January 13, 2016, 7:37am

The key repeat rate in Sublime Text is much slower than in other Apps. I am on OS X. Is this configurable? I don’t see any options related to this in the general preference file.

**Giganic** · January 13, 2016, 7:37am

Hi Mate,

Try going into your System Preferences > Keyboard and moving the slider under “Key Repeat” all the way to the right “Fast”, that should fix up your problem.

Hope this helps!

Giganic.

**shanebdavis** · January 13, 2016, 7:41am

I’m having the same problem on a MBP-retina. I have my System -> Preferences key repeat set to max and I still have this problem.

OS X 10.8.1 (12B19)
SublimeText 2.0.1 build 2217

Another user with the same problem:
sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/8 … -osx-lion/

**aziz** · January 13, 2016, 7:42am

Same problem here. mac book pro (normal display but mainly using the Apple Cinema Display) with OSX 10.8.1

**arek1** · January 13, 2016, 7:42am

Same problem on my machine. Have set Preferences - Keyboard to max and in other apps is OK but in ST2 it is so slow.

If using ST2 with TextExpander snippet using function to set cursor in concrete position after expanding abbreviation it is totally unusable becouse coursor mouvement is so slow.

Retina MBP ML 10.8.1

**ben_d** · January 13, 2016, 8:06am

I’m still/also seeing this problem. The key repeat rate is DEFINITELY slower inside SublimeText 2 than it is throughout the rest of my system.
My system specs:
–Mac OS 10.8.2
–Sublime Text 2.0.1 build 2217

It also seems to be directly connected to the size of the window. When I have my window maxed out on my 27" display, the key repeat rate is obviously slower than it is when I make my window very small (c. 1/4 of the screen).

**verticalforest** · January 13, 2016, 8:08am

I’ve been having this problem for a while, and its been extremely annoying, but I think I’ve found a solution, at least for my machine.

I noticed that when I had terminal closed, the sublime cursor moved much more quickly. After further investigation, I determined that I by turning off the “blur” affect on the background of terminal, sublime would stay just as fast even with terminal running. This issue also only seems to appear when my mac is running on integrated graphics, so I’m guessing that it is a hardware limitation of the integrated graphics card that slows down the compositing process. Terminal also runs much faster with blur disabled, so I think I’m going to keep it off permanently now.

A few other interesting tidbits:

Sublime’s performance only degrades when I set the terminal blur to above 62%
If the terminal window is completely covered by sublime, no performance hit occurs
Its less noticeable, a maximized, blurred terminal will also affect the scrolling performance of Safari and other applications

**tpneumat** · January 13, 2016, 8:25am

Same deal here. Terminal doesn’t seem to have an effect. I actually had this same issue with BBEdit and it drove me so nutz that was the main reason I switched to sublime. Whats going on here? If nothing else, a text editor needs to be a fast way to manipulate text.

**hedefalk** · January 13, 2016, 8:33am

+1

Same problem in latest Sublimetext 3. Any official comment?

Thanks,
Viktor

**BUGMENOT** · January 13, 2016, 8:38am

Still seeing this on latest Sublime Text 2 and is definitely related to window size. Running on OS X 10.9.2, 1920x1080. Is there any solution for this?

Related articles:

sublimetext.com/forum/viewt … f=3&t=3555
sublimetext.com/forum/viewt … =3&t=13824
sublimetext.com/forum/viewt … =3&t=15424
sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/8 … -osx-lion/
sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/4 … dow-sizes/

**BUGMENOT** · January 13, 2016, 8:38am

If anyone still looks for solution, I’ve managed to solve it via “gpu_window_buffer” setting with “true” as value. This is for OS X only, as it says in description for this property.

**tomv** · January 13, 2016, 8:54am

I was having the same problem and it was driving me a little nuts. Fortunately, I do a lot of scrolling using the trackpad, but sometimes I really want to just hold down control-n to scroll through a bunch of code.

I just discovered if I close the sidebar (that’s what I call it) everything is fine.

So that got me thinking because I installed the Soda theme on my MacBook Pro.

I disabled it, and my key repeat rate is now the same as the system-wide setting.

So I suggest not using any themes and see if that clears it up for you.

**mugukamil** · January 13, 2016, 8:55am

[quote=“tomv”]I was having the same problem and it was driving me a little nuts. Fortunately, I do a lot of scrolling using the trackpad, but sometimes I really want to just hold down control-n to scroll through a bunch of code.

I just discovered if I close the sidebar (that’s what I call it) everything is fine.

So that got me thinking because I installed the Soda theme on my MacBook Pro.

I disabled it, and my key repeat rate is now the same as the system-wide setting.

So I suggest not using any themes and see if that clears it up for you.[/quote]

It’s work for me too

**jlinton** · March 30, 2020, 10:08pm

I’m on windows, sublime 3.2.2 and I see the same thing when the sublime window is maximized on a 5K monitor (system scaling disabled, but sublime text scaled). Reducing the window size makes it fast again. Sort of annoying.

**bschaaf** · March 30, 2020, 11:19pm

Note that we already have a fix for Sublime Text 4 that’s ok the current Sublime Merge dev build: hardware accelerated rendering. Using "hardware_acceleration": "opengl" should fix this on for windows high-dpi displays (this is the default for macOS already).

Slow Key Repeat