Re: Syntax Highlighting Latency in Emacs

[jab3 <manual@helpdesk.org>]

Peter Dyballa finally wrote on Sun December 12 2004 08:22 am:

> 
> Am 12.12.2004 um 02:42 schrieb jab3:
> 
>> a few thousand K
> 
> In other words: a few MB. Then it's quite normal.
> 

In other words, yeah, I wasn't thinking and I'm an idiot, etc. :-)  I meant
a few K.  I remember in the manual Stallman saying something about large
files requiring more time to process, so with the 'few thousand K' I was
trying to say that that wasn't the problem, but of course I misspoke. 
Whoops.  (I've got the GNU Emacs manual (the paper version from FSF) so I'm
going to look through it to see if I can figure something out)  It just
seems odd; I mean, it's still slower than vim with the same file, no matter
the size.  Maybe it is the overhead that vim doesn't have to account for
(i.e. - maybe it's because Emacs is a more powerful program checks and does
so much at once; I don't mean anything derogatory); I don't know.

> Remember that it's Lisp that finds and then checks the words and then
> does appropriate syntax-highlighting.

Yeah, I wondered about that.  I'm also interested in figuring out (maybe
with regular expressions) a way to make Emacs emulate another vim feature
that I do like: highlighting control characters in quoted strings in a C
file.  For instance, in printf("Hello %s\n", name); I would like the %s and
\n highlighted in a different color from the normal string quote color.  So
I may be adding more overhead, which is why I wanted to see if it was a
problem that could be diminished a bit. 


Cheers and thanks,
jab3