Slow Ruby Syntax Highlighting in Vim

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 12:07:08 -0400

I recently switched back from MacVim to terminal (alacritty) Vim because I’m trying to step up my tmux game after reading the excellent tmux 2 book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. But anyways, I noticed incredibly slow syntax highlighting for larger ruby files, so slow that editing code was almost impossible. After lots of searching and debugging I found it was the regular expression engine Vim uses by default in combination with the Ruby syntax highlighter.

Tmux on ilikeorangutans

Slow Ruby Syntax Highlighting in Vim