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SynEdit performance bragging rights?

SynEdit Logo [1]Committed another round of speedups in the SynEdit SVN, and AFAICT SynEdit is now amongst the fastest text and highlighting editors out there!

To benchmark it yourself, if you don’t have a large text file hanging around, you can make a “meaningful” one easily.

Go to Delphi’s source\rtl\win directory and enter the following command-line:

type *.pas > c:\winall.pas

That should give you f.i. with  Delphi XE an 11 MB file, with 280k lines. Using the following file, here are my rough findings, for an executable compiled with Delphi XE, by order of decreasing performance:

Editor Time to load Time to reach last line Total
SynEdit [2] << 1 sec 0 sec << 1 sec
Delphi [3] XE < 1 sec << 1 sec < 1 sec
EmEditor [4] (11.0.2) 0 sec 1* sec 1* sec
Scintilla SciTe [5] 0 sec 2 sec 2 sec
Eclipse [6] (Indigo) 3 sec 0 sec 3 sec
Notepad (Win7) 3 sec 0 sec 3 sec
Notepad++ [7] (5.9.6.2) 0 sec 16 sec 16 sec

*: EmEditor  does its line indexing work in a background task, so the 1 sec delay to reach the last line is only visible if you try to reach it just after having opened the file.

Once you’ve reached the last line at least once, entering text at the top or the bottom of the file, selecting blocks, copy-pasting etc. is instantaneous enough in all above editors. Memory usage is roughly comparable, except for Eclipse, which is the worst by far.

Notepad++ is using Scintilla, but performs much worse than SciTe (Scintilla minimalistic text editor/demo), so there must be a glitch somewhere in Notepad++ (which I personally didn’t expect, must have been a regression of some sort in recent versions).

SynEdit also seems to scale better than  all the others above on even larger files (as tested on 100MB+ files).

For bragging rights, what other fast editors do you know of? 😉