Which default setting does make Vim very slow in Mac's Screen?

Answer 1

I'm guessing that the issue might be with your termcap and terminfo settings. Try commenting those out from your screenrc, and restarting screen.

Also, what (non-virtual) terminal are you using?

Ah, it looks like you're using OSX's Terminal.app, which is exactly what I use (with screen/zsh/vim). /usr/bin/screen should work with /usr/bin/vim with an empty .screenrc and .vimrc by default.

% touch empty_screenrc
% cat empty_screerc
% /usr/bin/screen -c empty_screenrc
#...and within screen
% /usr/bin/vim -u NONE

If the problem still persists, the problem may be in your shell. But if this fixes the problem, I'd suggest posting your ~/.vimrc to aid in further diagnosis.

Answer 2

I think that the OS X default version of screen does not support 256 colors. You can set vim to use a lower number of colors in your .vimrc file:

set t_Co=16

On Mac OS X you can rebuild screen to use 256 colors, see here: http://pjkh.com/articles/2008/07/09/osx-iterm-screen-vim-256-colors.

Here's the short version of the instructions:

Rebuild screen making sure to include the 256 colors option:

./configure --enable-colors256

Then you will need to add the following to your ~/.screenrc:

# terminfo and termcap for nice 256 color terminal
# allow bold colors - necessary for some reason
attrcolor b ".I"
# tell screen how to set colors. AB = background, AF=foreground
termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm'
# erase background with current bg color
defbce "on"

Source

Answer 3

It looks like there are some known issues relating to wrap mode for OS X, see number 1. here. It suggests a workaround.

Answer 4

Debugging:

One suggested me to freeze my terminal from the changes of other applications by

ttyctl -f

However, it did not seem to solve the problem. Nevertheless, it may help us to find the bug, since we do not have other apps changing the situation now.

Answer 5

I've had similar problems with irssi and bash, which were caused by colour codes not closed correctly..

Have you tried a different vim theme (specifically the default one), or running :syntax off ?