Text editor moves at the speed of tortoise

cephlon · 09-08-2004, 10:28 PM

My text editor is my most important program next to my browser, as its what I use all day. So I have certain requirments when it comes to my text editor. Things I used to live without but have grown so acustom to. Tabbed, syntax highlighting, fast, awesome search and replace, etc..
I have recenlty switched back to try Linux yet another time.

First let me say that I love Bluefish and Quanta. But I can't use these text editors because whenever I start to type my cpu shoots up to 100% and the text takes a second to or so to even show up. This is of course unacceptable. my system is not slow either. AMD 2.2XP, 512MB etc...The Cute editor is very fast, but a pain in the ass to configure. I can not find any documentation on configuring the editor so that it saves my preferences.

So if someone can either help me speed up Quanta, or point me to a guide on configuring Cute, I would be very very greatful. I am using Suse 9.1 if it matters.

smithtodda · 09-08-2004, 10:34 PM

I also am running SuSE 9.1 (Pro) on a very similar system (AMD Athlon XP 2400, 512 MB RAM, etc.) and I cannot recreate the problem. Bluefish and Quanta both work fine right out of the gate. First time I cracked them open, as a matter of fact. No delay in typing, no CPU maxout. I don't know what's going on in your situation. Have you any other ideas what it could be? Any other pertinent details you can think to add?

stevie_velvet · 09-09-2004, 01:08 AM

if one edito goe 100% CPU time there may be a bug in the editor, if more than one then the underlying filesystem might be suspect ; check the disk out using fsck & keep a eye on the logs, e.g. #dmesg

wipe · 09-09-2004, 02:02 AM

Update your video card driver, especially if you have an Nvidia card. They don't give away the source code so Linux distros won't ship with it, but instead have a somewhat crappy one. It sounds like your system has a problem with font rendering, assuming everything else works without a hitch, even with many applications open simultaneously. If one editor is superfast compared to the others, it must be doing something differently, like not anti-aliasing (blurring) fonts.

Simon

mbeattie74 · 11-11-2004, 09:25 PM

I have the exact same problem with Quanta (3.3.1) - typing saturates the CPU, which is no slouch (P4 2.2). Bluefish (0.13) does not have the same problem.
Turning off anit-aliased fonts in KDE has little to no effect. Turning off syntax-highliting in Quanta reduces the CPU usage to idling, but is not an acceptable solution.
It may point towards a font-rendering problem, as mentioned by wipe. I wonder if cephlon could confirm which X drivers are being used? I'm currently using the NVidia drivers, with the following options if my XF86Config-4:

Code:

Section "Module"
#       Load    "GLcore"
        Load    "bitmap"
        Load    "dbe"
        Load    "ddc"
#       Load    "dri"
        Load    "extmod"
        Load    "freetype"
        Load    "glx"
        Load    "int10"
        Load    "record"
        Load    "speedo"
        Load    "type1"
        Load    "vbe"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Generic Video Card"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        Option          "NvAgp" "3"
        Option          "RenderAccel" "1"
        Option          "NoLogo" "1"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
        Mode    0666
EndSection

additional - I've found that while working with PHP files, entering text within quotation marks particularly saps CPU power, eg:

PHP Code:



$string="typing text very slowly...

Closing the quotation marks, and then entering the text between allows the CPU to continue idling.

foo_bar_foo · 11-11-2004, 10:07 PM

for what it's worth i have Bluefish 0.13 and i do not have this problem at all....
it never uses more than like 0%
Quanta 3.2 because it is more busy and uses Qt text widget uses at most when i am typing 11% - 15%
in a flash every so often and then goes immediately back down..

Both programms use really different libs and implementations so the problem must be something underlying like the others have said and not a lib or app bug ???

it is possible of course to write a bad syntax highlighter that consumes all cpu cycles looping over the text looking for syntax but i don't think that's going on here either.

mbeattie74 · 11-19-2004, 04:02 AM

Actually, after a little digging around on bugs.kde.org I found that Quanta's php parsing problems are a known issue to the developers:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63000

Let's hope they get it sorted out soon, because for web applications it's the ideal solution with it's built-in project management and CVS interface.