Syntax highlighting causes terrible lag in Vim

Question

I love Vim. But its giving me hard times right now.

I use a lot of plugins and during the last 6 months, I\'ve found a lot of awesome ones. But my Vim got really slu

Answer 1

I found that "set foldmethod=syntax" makes 7.4 almost unusable slow e.g. for js&ruby files (ubuntu 13.10) whereas "set foldmethod=indent" works fine.

Answer 2

I'm pretty sure that

set t_Co=256
set background=dark
colorscheme candyman

have nothing to do with that lag. The two first lines are useless (the number of usable colors is defined according to your $TERM and your colorscheme already does set background=dark) but not really harmful.

Common "Vim is slowing to a crawl" causes include poorly written autocmds, too many autocmds, reloading one's ~/.vimrc too often, poorly written plugins…

Please post your setup so that we can help you find out why you experience that lag.

Answer 3

From another stack overflow question, I get vim fast by adding the following line in .vimrc file:
set re=1
This will force vim to use a older version of regex engine and it is actually FASTER for ruby.

Answer 4

I have had this problem for a long time, and it was driving me crazy. I tried installing vim-ruby. Not sure if that helped but at least now I have the most up-to-date version of ruby syntax highlighting (with any performance improvements since the last version of Vim was released).

But then I looked further, and discovered that vim-ruby has a mode that skips all the expensive highlighting. Try adding this line to your vimrc and see if it helps (it did for me, finally!):

let ruby_no_expensive=1