After trying several editors I am liking Kate the most for coding, however I noticed at times it can be very choppy. For example holding down a key such as - to make a long line actually takes a good minute before it reaches the end of the page. In Windows using notepad++ this is a matter of seconds. All my code is on a remote server using NFS so there may be some slight latency, but it was the same when using Windows and it was fine.

I can't seem to find much online when googling given "kate" is actually a common name for a person, so I'm finding nothing having to do with the actual program. Has anyone ever run into this before and is there a way to make it more responsive? I have 12GB of ram, so perhaps a way to force it to load the entire file in ram and only touch the disk when I'm actually saving?

I'm using Xubuntu.

I have used Kate off and on for a long time. Never noticed that issue.

You can make a ram drive or ram file system to move your work to and see if that is in fact what the issue is. 12G ought to be enough to make a 4G or so size.

I tested it on my SSD and it is indeed disk related. It seems like every single character press is accessing the disk and generating I/O. So the network latency is making it very choppy because it's accessing the network for every single key stroke. Is there a way to stop it from doing that?

Boot to a live cd or usb and see if that happens also. How large is this file you are working on?

Live CDs don't seem to work well with nvidia cards. They flicker like mad so I want to avoid going through that again, the install process was bad enough. I think I have epilepsy just from going through that LOL.

It does it with any file, even a new file that I create.

If I run tcpdump locally and hold down a key in kate, it generates tons of packets. About 300 packets to make a line that is 100 characters.

It's very brutal when using kate over VPN too. omg. I just hope there's some kind of setting I can turn on/off to stop it from constantly accessing the disk like that. (without having to keep copying files all over)

I just loaded up opensuse on a usb flash and then added in Kate. Worked smoothly. The entire OS and apps worked well.

If it is only kate then maybe uninstall it and then reinstall it.

Just figured it out, in the settings under open/save and advanced tab, I clicked the checkbox for "disable swap files syncing". It's no longer trying to write to disk for every character. It's no longer choppy now. I can actually code when a backup job is running.

Thanks for the update, good catch. Now I have to go back and look to see what happens on mine.

Mark the post as solved.