Inform7 IDE Slow Editing on MacOS Catalina

[wmodes]

I'm editing a larger file in the Inform7 IDE and am experiencing very slow editing. I've searched and found no one else reporting this. I can edit small files with no lag, but large files present a huge lag as I type. Compiling happens at normal speed. Attached is a link to a video of me typing far ahead of the buffer.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JwRLdLLq1advkmNKAOCrEDUCQP441SR8/view?usp=sharing

Here are the deets of my file:

The 33597-word source text has successfully been translated into a world with 41 rooms and 184 things, and the index has been brought up to date.

Happy to provide source file to test on your inform version.

And the details of my version of Inform:

Download file: I7-6M62-OSX-Interim.dmg Inform version: 1.68.1 OS: MacOS Catalina

But this also happens with earlier versions of Inform, such as I7-6M62-OSX.dmg

Thanks for any leads to fixing this.

[wmodes]

I thought it might be a large block of ChangeLog notes that I kept in comment form in the file, but it wasn't that. I also thought I might have a tricky hanging bracket or quote that was making the file difficult, but it appears not.

It also appears to not be purely an issue of length, as I pasted in half of the text of Pride and Prejudice and noted only a small slow down. With the entire book, typing was considerably slower.

It appears that there are processes that happen after every keystroke whose rapidity is affected by the length/complexity of the text. That might be worth looking at, changing to a less frequent update, or only after a user has stopped typing for a period.

Would it help to try my source file?

[erkyrath]

We noted on the forum that this only happens when syntax coloring is turned on.

Further profiling (thanks ArdiMaster, https://intfiction.org/t/inform7-ide-slow-editing/49086/22 ) indicates that a whole lot of time is spent in updateTextTouchBarItems. The problem is only observable on MacBook Pros with touchbar.

See screenshot:

[erkyrath]

I'm pretty sure that the real problem is that when syntax coloring is on, the view's redisplay method is being called thousands of times per keystroke. The touchbar call itself is only marginally slow (a few milliseconds), but because it's called way too often, it beats the CPU to death.

[weaversam8]

For additional feedback, I'm running "Version 1.68 (1.68.1)" on Big Sur (11.6) on an M1 Mac Mini and also encountering slow editing. My device doesn't have a touchbar, but there are still large lags on every keystroke, even on small files like the Onyx example.

[TobyLobster]

For a possible workaround in the latest version v1.82 (v10.1.2), see https://github.com/TobyLobster/Inform/issues/28#issuecomment-1257520463

[TobyLobster]

This should be fixed now.