Subject: Massive Energy Impact (4500+) on M4 Pro MacBook – Solved by Disabling Indexing

[engins]

The Issue

I recently switched from an M2 Pro MacBook to a new M4 Pro MacBook Pro . While I expected better efficiency, I noticed my battery life was significantly worse than my previous M2 Pro model.

Upon checking the Activity Monitor , I was shocked to see Sublime Text at the top of the “12 hr Power” list with an incredible value of 4,558.10 . For comparison, other heavy apps like Slack were around 125. Despite the high cumulative energy impact, the app felt responsive, but the background drain was unsustainable for mobile work.

Technical Environment

• Device: MacBook Pro (M4 Pro Chip).
• OS: macOS (Latest).
• Previous Device: MacBook Pro (M2 Pro Chip).

The Solution

After investigating the settings, it appeared that the background file indexing process was causing a massive loop or high CPU overhead on the new M4 architecture, especially when large project folders were open.

I resolved the issue by modifying the User Preferences ( Preferences.sublime-settings — User ) with the following overrides:

JSON{ "index_files": false, "hardware_acceleration": "opengl", "gpu_window_buffer": true, "show_git_status": false }

Results

Immediately after applying these settings and restarting the app, the “Energy Impact” dropped to 0.1 .

• index_files: false was the most critical change to stop the background CPU spikes.
• hardware_acceleration: “opengl” helped offload rendering to the M4 Pro’s GPU, further reducing the strain on the CPU cores.

If anyone else is experiencing unusual battery drain on the new M4 chips, I highly recommend checking your indexing settings and enabling hardware acceleration.!

[bschaaf]

This reads as AI generated with inaccurate/out of date info. On macOS opengl is enabled by default and gpu_window_buffer hasn’t done anything for a while.

Indexing can cause high CPU load, but it’s usually very fast and only needs to be done once. The entire Linux kernel repository takes just 16s on my machine.

A common issue is when people add more than their project to the side-bar, some add their entire home folder. This causes performance issues with more than just the file indexing, so I’d recommend against doing that.

[razbiva4]

I created an account on this forum just to comment on this thread because I had this exact same issue today and this is mentioned nowhere else.

Just a couple of days ago I got a new MacBook Pro M5 Pro - completely clean setup. Installed Sublime Text, opened it once, then closed it, and that was it. I never imported any projects or even really used the editor.

But my battery was getting absolutely destroyed. It went from 100% to 15% in around 4–5 hours, with barely anything running besides a browser and Discord. Activity Monitor showed Sublime Text with “12 hr Power” consumption of over 9,500 and a constant Energy Impact of practically 99% (graph at the bottom).

At first I genuinely thought my machine was defective. After the battery had already drained three times today under basically no load, I investigate the issue and tracked it down to Sublime Text editor.

[bschaaf]

When you say you closed Sublime Text, do you mean quit or just closing the window? Note that in either case Sublime Text doesn’t do any indexing, that only happens when a folder is added to the side bar.

FWIW we’ve had Sublime Text running but mostly unused on a mac for months and the twelve hour power stat is consistently at 0.

[razbiva4]

I’m pretty sure I closed the window first and then fully quit the app afterward.

Also, I’m not suggesting the issue is related to indexing specifically. I only mentioned that I experienced very similar behaviour. I wasn’t trying to imply indexing was the cause.

I’ve had Sublime Text running constantly on my previous Mac for years (though it may have been a much older version) without any issues at all. So my suspicion is that this may be something specific to the latest release or possibly a corrupted install.

One thing that might be relevant… during installation I got an error message that looked very similar to the one mentioned in this thread:
“Error when attempting to unzip installation file”

Error when attempting to unzip installation file

I am getting an error: “Unable to expand sublime_text_build_4200_max.zip (Error 94 - Bad message)” I am on macOS Sequoia 15.7.5 I am using the native Archive Utility to open the download. I have admin permissions for my device. I have tried downloading several times from the following links" https://www.sublimetext.com/download https://download.sublimetext.com/sublime_text_build_4200_mac.zip

At the time I mostly ignored it because the app still launched successfully.

I’ve since deleted the app entirely, but I may try reinstalling it again later and see if I can reproduce the problem.

[engins]

You caught me regarding the AI! I used an assistant to help translate and structure my initial post to make it as clear as possible, which explains why it hallucinated some outdated settings like gpu_window_buffer . I apologize for the confusion there.

To address the sidebar issue: I definitely didn’t add my entire Home folder. It was just a standard project directory. I regularly run heavy development tools and IDEs, so seeing a lightweight text editor hit a 4,500+ energy impact out of nowhere was quite a shock.

A huge thanks to @Y for creating an account just to share your experience. It’s honestly a relief to know my M4 Pro isn’t defective! Since you are seeing the exact same 99% CPU usage and 9500+ power drain on a brand-new M5 Pro with a clean setup, this strongly points to a deeper bug with the current build on the newer Apple Silicon chips or macOS Sequoia, rather than a simple user configuration error.

I didn’t notice the zip extraction error (Error 94) when I initially installed it, but I am going to completely uninstall Sublime Text today, do a fresh installation, and watch out for any extraction issues.

To the staff/devs: Since multiple users are experiencing this massive background drain loop on M4 and M5 Macs, is there any specific diagnostic data, crash report, or process log we can provide to help you investigate what might be getting stuck in the background?

[bschaaf]

Which process is having high CPU usage, the main sublime_text process or the plugin_host-3.8 or some other? Can you take a sample using Activity Monitor of the process that’s having high CPU usage?

[gbird]

I have a new M5 MBP on order, due in the next week or so. I plan to do a ground up build, and one of the first apps will be ST. I’ll do some performance monitoring before, during and after, to see whether I can provide a baseline.

I’ll do this before I add any plugins and let it run for a while to see whether there is any cumulative performance degradation.

Hopefully this may narrow things down a bit.