When I edit a code file with more than a few hundred lines in gedit, it takes frustratingly long to write code early in the file. All the text after the cursor appears to get its highlighting refreshed synchronously, and my poor single-core, 512MB system is brought to its knees. I've taken to writing new code in a separate file and pasting it in later, or switching highlighting off entirely.

Is there some way I can make gedit refresh the syntax colors asynchronously, say after idling for a few seconds? This might speed up the process enormously.

Have you tried vim? That does syntax highlighting, macros, buffers etc etc.

A better question would be, have you tried Emacs? gedit to vim is crazy hard because of the 3 different modes paradigm shift. Emacs is a little easier to learn in that respect.

I'm definitely not getting into that religious war

I've actually been using vim for the past four years (without the syntax highlighting though and without really using most of the commands); found emacs a bit harder to get into because the documentation uses an unfamiliar terminology. I'll probably take the time to learn it too one of these days; knowing both can't hurt.

But thanks for reinforcing what I should have realized already - when it comes to performance, the terminal beats the GUI any time. It just takes some effort to learn the terse and powerful commands needed to do what is otherwise a few clicks in the toolbar away.