Bug: Ctrl-F is slow in big files for the Glitch editor

Please fix this bug. I represent the Arras game community. When the community inherited the codebase, most of the code was in one big file. Many newcomers to Arras development don’t have their own servers, so they remix a glitch template we’ve set up. Because most of the code (5K lines) is all in one file, Ctrl-F is frequently used to navigate the code.

However Glitch’s Ctrl-F is rather slow and thus quite frustrating for newcoming developers. This may be their first time handling such a large codebase.

As a community-building exercise, we’d like to make the newcoming experience better. That’s where Glitch comes in: fix the bug!

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This is more of an issue on your pc, not glitch itself. However there are some things I’m sure glitch could do to optimize speed a little bit, I’m sure it won’t help your problem if you’re dealing with 5k lines.

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My PC is plenty fast. I frequently edit the same huge files in VS Code or WebStorm, and neither have the same issue.

@CrazyPython can you verify that my remix https://glitch.com/edit/#!/nebulous-trader is a remix of the project you’re having these difficulties with? And if it is can you give me some parameters that exhibit the slowness you’re describing, because based on a couple of quick searches I’m not seeing any difficulties.

For what it’s worth I think that the Ctrl+F functionality you’re seeing in Glitch is implemented in CodeMirror. We don’t have any current plans to modify that behavior, but perhaps we can come up with some workarounds.

You’re right, the issue no longer reproduces.

But why not use the ace code editor, which is used in cloud9? It has a simple but effective autocomplete autocomplete feature unlike codemirror, great for newcomers learning to explore a codebase.

Theres also monaco which is VSCode but in the browser, its good but unfortunately its not very usable on mobile. It has intellisense and find&replace which unfortunately the current editor doesn’t have. Maybe add a way to switch the editor?

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You can find and replace with Ctrl+Alt+F

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Just to add a little context here, we have regular conversations about the editor and plan to add additional features in the future. However, replacing the editor would be an extensive undertaking that’s not currently under consideration - CodeMirror is pretty tightly integrated with a number of other infrastructure concerns and changing it isn’t sufficiently valuable for us to expend the level of effort required at the expense of other features we’re working on.

As always, https://support.glitch.com/c/feature-ideas is there for people to voice their hopes and dreams and we’ll take posts there into account as we plan for future development, so if there are specific features you’re interested in please upvote or create new topics there to reflect what you’d like to see.

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