Re: [Texmacs-dev] Usability of TeXmacs on 2 year old computers

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> > On PIII-750 unoptimized TeXmacs is rather usable :)
> 
> With gcc version 2.95.4 20011002 and a PIII-600 Mobile I find myself
> commonly thinking on how to split long paragraphs in two, since even
> though my TeXmacs is optimized the performance is behind my typing
> speed. Environment removal and creation on 8 page heavily mathematical
> documents takes about half a second. I've seen same class computers
> perform similarly (though they were always laptops).

I agree that typing slows down on older computers and I have already
tried hard to make TeXmacs faster. We can probably still gain about
50% on mathematical texts and quite a lot on environments when David
will have finished the new rewriting scheme. However, all these
improvements are very time consuming, so they will not take place quickly.

Nevertheless, I also feel that one should not exagerate:
I have been using TeXmacs to type several articles on a 450MHz laptop,
and one of my articles was about 60 pages. Even though environment
creation takes half a second, I cannot call this extremely slow,
since creating a new environment is not as frequent as typing plain text.

As to long paragraphs: you should not select professional hyphenation
when typing. But even then, I agree that really long paragraphs
slow down the editor. Nevertheless, I again think that one should not
exagerate either. In a page filling paragraph with mathematics on
my 1GHz laptop I do not notice any substantial slowdown when typing
(probably about 0.2sec).

> I have 256Mb RAM, what else could be affecting performance?. Does
> anybody else feel that optimized TeXmacs on PIII =>500Mhz is not fast
> enough?.
> 
> Does anybody have any clues as to what to do? At the moment I cannot
> afford a faster computer. 

You can do nothing about it except being patient...
both for your computer and for faster versions of TeXmacs.