I installed a vim 8.1 on the cluster I am using in my home folder. I also installed a number of plugins including YouCompleteMe. I then made an alias so that I can open the vim easier.
However, I found that my vim cannot delete letters very well. When I am writing I can delete what I just typed. But if I move the cursor to other places, then it cannot delete letters at all, unless I type in something at first.
I am using a Scientific Linux system developed by the Fermi Lab.
How can I solve this problem?
Thanks
This sounds like the default configuration of the :help 'backspace' option. If this doesn't contain start, you cannot remove characters over the start of insertion by pressing Backspace, only what got inserted before. Removal of characters via the x or d commands (:help deleting) should always work - anywhere. Else, you have a serious misconfiguration should inspect your ~/.vimrc and re-add plugins one by one.
If you're new to Vim (and using backspace for deletion in insert mode is a typical approach of people used to other, modeless editors), you should spend 30 minutes on the vimtutor that comes with it (see :help vimtutor). Then, there are several good resources, cheatsheets, and vi / Vim tutorials out there on the net. http://vimcasts.org/ has several short entertaining episodes that go beyond the basics.
Your problem could be fixed by putting
set backspace=indent,eol,start
into your ~/.vimrc. Also have a look at :help defaults.vim; by including that instead, you'll get other goodies and recommended settings as well! (The reason for the odd defaults is backwards compatibility.)
I'm using vim now for almost over a month and I am very dedicated to it. But since I added a few plugins, navigating through larger files (400+ lines... especially PHP files) makes vim pretty slow. It doesn't bother me much, because it is still pretty fast.
But I sometimes face the problem that navigating with hjkl hangs and even though I stopped pressing j for instance it keeps going for quite a while which is very annoying.
I run vim in iTerm on my mac and I'm not sure what to do here.
Thank you for any help.
//edit: Okay I found now what causes trouble. Everything that changes the current line style or messes with line numbers causes trouble.
So set cursorline or set rnu nu are causing my vim to lag. I think it is because the "redraw" is a pain for my terminal.
This is absolutely normal.
Some vim plugins are powerful, but not intended to be used handling large files (because it will require an enormous memory usage).
But the solution is simple: Use the LargeFile plugin which automatically detects when the file you are opening is too big and, in that case, disable some plugins and features just for that buffer.
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 sluggish too. I do constant cleanups, but it doesn't help much.
I'm at the point, where Vim is completely unusable. It feels like it renders at 2-5 frames per second, switching tabs/buffers takes about a second, scrolling with hjkl is awfully terrible, the lag is so bad, even typing a sentence in insert mode is confusing (due to lag).
Edit: Actually, when I open fresh instance of Vim its OK-ish, but than within 15 minutes it becomes unusable.
I've just spent 4 hours trying to figure out which plugin or config is causing the pain. I was unsuccessful.
However, I did find out, that removal of this setting causes all the lag to go away:
syntax on
These 3 lines in conjunction with syntax make everything even worse.
set t_Co=256
set background=dark
colorscheme candyman
Interesting. So, syntax highlighting is turning Vim from super snappy to incredibly sluggish?
I tried enabling syntax in "clean" mode:
vim -u NONE
And its not an issue there.
So what seems to be the issue is Syntax Highlighting in combination with one or more of my plugins. I tried disabling bunch, no luck.
Is there any way to do profiling? I'm fairly exhausted from manual testing.
Has anyone had similar experience? Maybe take a quick peek into my .vimrc, see if anything rings a bell.
https://bitbucket.org/furion/dotfiles
SOLUTION:
The plugin causing the mess was:
Bundle "gorodinskiy/vim-coloresque.git"
I recommend reading the answers tho, good insights.
Edit (1 month later): The coloresque plugin has seen some improvements.
EDIT: Blogged about how this all works, with screenshots and awesome-sauce.
https://eduncan911.com/software/fix-slow-scrolling-in-vim-and-neovim.html
Original answer below...
:syntime on
move around in your ruby file and then
:syntime report
It reported the following slowest matching for me, and you can see that there are not even 1 match.
I disabled rubyPredefinedConstant in ruby.vim file and problem solved. Vim regex engine does not like something in ruby syntax highlight regex. You will have to find the balance between enough syntax highligting and a good performance.
Here is the top 3 slowest syntax highlighting regex for ruby reported on my Mac OS 10.8.5, homebrew Vim 7.4 (console vim)
TOTAL COUNT MATCH SLOWEST AVERAGE NAME PATTERN
3.498505 12494 0 0.008359 0.000280 rubyPredefinedConstant \%(\%(\.\#<!\.\)\#<!\|::\)\_s*\zs\%(STDERR\|STDIN\|STDOUT\|TOPLEVEL_BINDING\|TRUE\)\>\%(\s*(\)\#!
2.948513 12494 0 0.006798 0.000236 rubyPredefinedConstant \%(\%(\.\#<!\.\)\#<!\|::\)\_s*\zs\%(MatchingData\|ARGF\|ARGV\|ENV\)\>\%(\s*(\)\#!
2.438253 12494 0 0.005346 0.000195 rubyPredefinedConstant \%(\%(\.\#<!\.\)\#<!\|::\)\_s*\zs\%(DATA\|FALSE\|NIL\)\>\%(\s*(\)\#!
Or you can try vim-ruby as pointed out by Dojosto
You have autocmd spam. You should wrap all of your autocmd statements in groups which clear the group before re-adding the autocmds. It looks like your .vimrc has most autocmds commented-out, so maybe there is a plugin that is causing the issue. Check the output of this command:
:au CursorMoved
If there's a bunch of duplicate handlers there, that's your problem.
Here's an example of autocmd discipline from my .vimrc:
augroup vimrc_autocmd
autocmd!
"toggle quickfix window
autocmd BufReadPost quickfix map <buffer> <leader>qq :cclose<cr>|map <buffer> <c-p> <up>|map <buffer> <c-n> <down>
autocmd FileType unite call s:unite_settings()
" obliterate unite buffers (marks especially).
autocmd BufLeave \[unite\]* if "nofile" ==# &buftype | setlocal bufhidden=wipe | endif
" Jump to the last position when reopening a file
autocmd BufReadPost * if line("'\"") > 1 && line("'\"") <= line("$") | exe "normal! g`\"" | endif
" ...etc...
augroup END
The autocmd! at the beginning of the augroup block clears out the current group (vimrc_autocmd, in this case) before re-adding the autocmds.
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.
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.
I've noticed that vim can slow down to a halt if you're using anything that dynamically changes the background color. Try turning off :set cursorline or :set cursorcolumn (if you have them set).
I'd like to thank everyone helping me out on this issue. Good news is, my Vim is snappy again.
I've started with fresh Vim re-install. I've than added plugin by plugin, until I found the root of all evil.
Bundle "gorodinskiy/vim-coloresque.git"
Its a plugin that was causing me all this pain. Since I had it for a while, it wasn't a suspect, thats why I discovered it so late.
What this plugin does, is whenever it finds a word for color (eg red, green), or hex value (eg. #FFFFFF), it sets background color of the text to match the color that its describing. Brilliant idea, but seems like poor implementation.
Removing this plugin removed the lags.
But I didn't stop here. I've done a major cleanup of my .vimrc as well. Removed some more plugins I hadn't used. Grouped my autocmds and removed unnecessary ones.
My Vim is very snappy now. I'm happy again.
Syntax highlighting can be slow, but that should be limited to some (somewhat pathological) files, and particular syntax(es). The latest Vim 7.4 has a new command :syntime to troubleshoot syntax highlighting slowness.
Apart from that, often, a binary search where you disable half of your plugins, then only one half of that (when the problem is still there), or the other half (when the problem vanished) lets you get to the problematic script quickly.
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.
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
For me that was set relativenumber feature which was slowing it down. Try to disable it with set norelativenumber and test.
Just in case it helps anyone out there:
I had accidentally created an extremely large tag file for my project; so my syntax highlighter was searching the large file to highlight function names.
So check your tag file! (In my setup I was using easy-tags so mine was placed at ~/.vimtags
Very late, but I figured this may help someone in a similar boat as me.
The plugin vim-nerdtree-syntax-highlight turned out to be lagging my entire editor. They do mention on their Github that people have reported lag issues, and offer some solutions.
So if anyone happens to be using that plugin, try using some of the fixes listed; this one works, but you need to be selective about which languages you want to keep:
let g:NERDTreeSyntaxDisableDefaultExtensions = 1
let g:NERDTreeDisableExactMatchHighlight = 1
let g:NERDTreeDisablePatternMatchHighlight = 1
let g:NERDTreeSyntaxEnabledExtensions = ['c', 'h', 'c++', 'php', 'rb', 'js', 'css']
I'm working on a large codebase, where each file has different indentation conventions: tabs, 4 spaces, 3 spaces, etc.
I currently default on tabs and do set shiftwidth=N expandtab smarttab when I come across a spaces-indented file, but that's annoying.
Is there any functionality in Vim, or a plugin, which can recognize that, for instance, the current buffer uses an indentation with three spaces per shift?
Various plugins exist that attempt to handle that situation. Here are a few I found by search for detect indent at vim.org
sleuth
DetectIndent
yafia
IndentConsistencyCop
IndentFinder
Good question，I'm facing the same problem too， and recently I wrote such a vim plugin for myself：https://github.com/luochen1990/indent-detector.vim
it has the following features:
detect mixed indent and echo warnning on bufEnter and bufWrite
automatically.
switch setting about indenting to fit the current indenting style automatically.
detecting time is limited, so you don't
need to worry about opening huge files.
I think it is well designed, and need to be known, post an issue on github if you have any suggestion :)
If I open a file containing 5,000 lines of code and continue to input, I found that my vim became very slow, it displays my input after about 1s.
It even won't become any better after I start up with --noplugin. But after switching my .vimrc file, everything gets fine again. The .vimrc file is written by myself and after checking for some time, I still can't locate the error. I have clear all the key maps, but the problem still exists.
So can you give my any advise or tell my how to debug in vim? I found there is a debug option but can't get how to work.
You can use the --startuptime option when start vim:
--startuptime {fname} *--startuptime*
During startup write timing messages to the file {fname}.
This can be used to find out where time is spent while loading
your .vimrc, plugins and opening the first file.
When {fname} already exists new messages are appended.
(Only available when compiled with the |+startuptime|
feature).
Take following steps to diagnose the problem:
type vim --startuptime log.txt main.java in bash to start vim
type :tabe log.txt in vim to view the log.
The reason for slowness is often the not set or wrong set ruby_path on compile time of vim (see also discussion on google vim/ruby google group). It is easier to set it in vimrc, because you can change it without recompiling vim. You can set the path through the g:ruby_path variable in your .vimrc file. Don't copy and paste both, use the right one.
If you setup RBENV you have to use this one:
" ruby path if you are using rbenv
let g:ruby_path = system('echo $HOME/.rbenv/shims')
If you setup RVM you have to use this one:
" ruby path if you are using RVM
let g:ruby_path = system('rvm current')
You can also use the vim-rbenv plugin, which sets the path too.
For me the part on loading ruby specific functions in vim got 10 times faster.
If you are using jruby, than the start up slowliness can be even bigger. See examples for fixing it here.
If running vim 7.4,
put this in your .vimrc
set regexpengine=1
vim 7.4 has a new regex engine that appear not to work well in some situations. Previous version vim 7.3 used the old engine ( set regexpengine=1 ).
The "slow response" from syntax highlighting problem affects the vim help files as well ( and .vimrc file too ).
Something like this is usually caused by syntax colouring. Try with :syntax off.
Add these lines to your ~/.vimrc or ~/.config/nvim/init.vim:
set lazyredraw " don't redraw everytime
set synmaxcol=128 " avoid slow rendering for long lines
syntax sync minlines=64 " faster syntax hl
Also if you're using tmux, consider adding this to your ~/.tmux.conf:
set -sg escape-time 10