For those using Vim with its GTK3 toolkit interface on Wayland, it soon should be delivering much better performance with pending patches.
Vim developer Dezza recently opened a Vim pull request to introduce deferred dirty redraw handling for its GTK3 Wayland back-end. The code reworks how the redraw process is handled for Vim’s GTK3 Wayland back-end. Dezza explained in the pull request of the impact on end users:
“The result is that scrolling is fast, mostly smooth and cpu usage lowered significantly; because key input, especially with continous key-repeat and scroll key such as pgup/c-b does not simultaneously pump excessive redraws from the micro-redraws queued by gui_gtk_draw_string_ext etc.”
Dezza added when initially opening the PR two weeks ago that it’s “a major milestone in performance on gtk3 with wayland.”
The improvement is currently pending as a nice performance improvement for Vim on GTK3 under Wayland while its GTK4 support continues to mature.