If you’re not using ag (the-silver-searcher) in your command line game, you should definitely check it out.
It’s typically an order of magnitude faster than the default grep that ships with most terminals.
It’s VERY abnormal for ag to be slow.
It’s even more uncharacteristic for vim to slow down to a crawl.
That’s why when my Ctrl-p and Ctrl-b shortcuts in vim started slowing down to unusable levels, I knew something was up. In fact, it got so bad, I slowly moved towards IntelliJ as my daily driver for most things because my fuzzy-finding in vim was just too slow to use.
The root cause of this was enabling iTerm 2 triggers in interactive apps like vim.
UPDATE: 2/2/2024
I started writing this article over a year ago, and for whatever reason forgot to publish it. At any rate, I’m publishing it now in hopes that it helps someone else out there.
If you’re struggling with this and would like help troubleshooting it, feel free to drop me line—I’d love to help investigate! Maybe then I could update this article with more useful information.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, you may also enjoy following me on twitter!