1 Reply by BitDrifter

  • BitDrifter
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Re: Very slow incremental search (/). (VS2010 Beta 3)

I am editing a 2000 line file, and it take about 5 - 10 seconds before the character I type on the keyboard appears on the command line when the text you are searching for does not exist.

Now unfortunately when you are trying to be quick sometimes a typo can happen and if that happens you might as well go get a cup of coffee so you can wait for your keystrokes to catch up because you can't do anything until then.

I suggest that as you type if the search string becomes not found then you stop trying to search because as you keep typing something is not all of a sudden going to match.

So if I have a file with the following text:
---
It was all that could be done in the time before the ancients.
---

And I perform this search:
/z

It should scan the file (which will take a second in a large file) and discover it does not exist.

So when I continue to type the following characters into the search:
/zll

It will not even bother scanning the file for zl or zll because it already knows there is nothing with a z in it.

That way I can quickly realize my mistake,  hit esc, and try again.

Thanks,

Chad

2 Reply by Jon_Symnum

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Re: Very slow incremental search (/). (VS2010 Beta 3)

Hello,

That is indeed a problem, but we plan to address the extreme-slowness before the official release. It would actually be nice to do some optimization like the one you suggest, and it's even pending for the other ViEmus, but it needs to be more complex than that, as the pattern is a regex. If you search for

  /[abc

Nothing will be found. But then, when you add the ']':

  /[abc]

Then the search should be redone. Nothing insurmountable, of course, but it would require some sophistication.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion and I hope text-access will be faster in the next releases, to actually make it usable.

Regards,

  -- Jon

3 Reply by BitDrifter

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Re: Very slow incremental search (/). (VS2010 Beta 3)

Yep so right I so rarely type a regex in there, I completely forgot to consider it in my suggestion.

4 Reply by rretter

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Re: Very slow incremental search (/). (VS2010 Beta 3)

Not that there's much chance you're unaware of it, but... the 2010 general release still plod...plod...plods along as you type chars into the search pattern.  So if you thought it had been fixed, sorry but -- no.  If (as seems more likely) it's just something that had to wait, fine.  I, for one, am waiting.

5 Reply by dreyln

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Re: Very slow incremental search (/). (VS2010 Beta 3)

I agree that the incremental search is abysmally slow.

6 Reply by Lachoneous

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Re: Very slow incremental search (/). (VS2010 Beta 3)

Jon, I don't know if you've had to use the .NET language for developing viemu for Dev Studio 2010 and if so you are probably painfully aware of the inability to time-out a bad Regex operation when using the Regex class.  A highly-unoptimized regex, when executed against a larger document can keep the thread busy for a long, long time.

We have a product on the market today that was built with C#.NET that uses a similar on-the-fly regex match execution against a loaded document while a user types in a matching pattern, so I know where you're coming from.

We ended up creating a class called TimedRegex which manages it's own thread for processing regex methods and aborts the thread and throws a custom exception if the regex method doesn't return within the timespan specified in the method call.

Anyways, let me know if you'd like some more info or if you already have something like that in place.

7 Reply by Jon_Symnum

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Re: Very slow incremental search (/). (VS2010 Beta 3)

Lachoneous, ViEmu has it's own hand-crafted, vim-compatible regex engine. It doesn't use VS's or .NET's. It's speed is adequate in most cases, especially since we try to avoid searching the whole file, we just have to improve the performance of the buffer-access we're doing in VS2010 (this same engine worked just fine for regular use on VS <= 2010).

To everyone else: we are now working in this area, and we hope the next version will show substantial improvement in this regard. I think it won't be hard to obtain it.

8 Reply by reevev

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Re: Very slow incremental search (/). (VS2010 Beta 3)

Hi Jon,

Is there any update on the incremental search performance?  I'm on version 2.5.10 now and incremental search is still very slow on larger files.  I'm resorting to using the built in VS search instead as it is orders of magnitude faster but would obviously prefer to use the viemu search.

Thanks,

Reeve.

9 Reply by jbirdman

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Re: Very slow incremental search (/). (VS2010 Beta 3)

Throwing in my 2 bits - this has been a real pain point for me.  We have large string resource files containing our localized strings and searching them using the '/' command is pretty much a non-starter.

I've also had to resort to using the build in VS search.  (blah!)

And since you usually only hear from us users when there's an issue - great product in general!  smile

10 Reply by Number8

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Re: Very slow incremental search (/). (VS2010 Beta 3)

...and there is still the problem of a search ending in a '///' comment...
Since that seems to be VS behavior, it might be very difficult to fix.

I agree with birdman, great product, hard to imagine using VS without it.