Getting Faster Rendering Speed on MacVim
I have been playing with MacVim quite a bit recently, and reading a few things off the Google Groups mailing list (vim_mac) and noticed that some folks were saying that there was a noticeable update delay on MacVim on their boxes. They didn't give details on the machines they were using, but they did say that the faster update scheme that the other Vim for Mac OS X also uses is the ATSUI renderer - MMAtsuiRenderer (as it's called in MacVim). So I decided to give it a go, you never know, it could be amazingly fast.
So I got the preferences setting that isn't available in the GUI and set it up:
defaults write org.vim.MacVim MMAtsuiRenderer -bool YES
and then restart MacVim. Turns out, it's faster, but it wasn't really slow on my MacBook Pro. Now, maybe the others are using slower MacBooks, or even G4 iBooks, I don't know. But it doesn't hurt to have the faster renderer being used.
I'm still amazed by the job they have done. Really exceptional.
UPDATE: it turns out that if you turn the ATSUI renderer ON (at least for version 7.1/26) then the mouse clicks don't move the cursor to the location clicked. This is not a "good thing" and I've posted a message on the vim_mac message board to see if I can get this either fixed in the next release, or if there's something else I need to set in order to get the click/moves working again. We'll have to wait and see, but for now, I'm turning it off as the updating wasn't bad at all, and I need to be able to click-n-move.
[4/25/08] UPDATE: I got news back from the vim_mac mailing list. It seems the mouse support for the ATSUI renderer is not in the code. It's a known issue that they are working on when they have the time. For now, I'll have to just use the NSTextView renderer which is OK with me.