short file makes micro freeze from the moment you edit anything

[evanescente-ondine]

I attach the file.
I've had this problem with micro on and on for years now. But there is literally no text editor remotely close, all others are worthless. So it irks me to no end to have to put up with it. I could use mousepad... But I need my waifu wallpaper behind while I work !
There is no error message, it just freezes then the micro process becomes a zombie, multiplies and eats half if not all the CPU resources (4 CPUS !). Cleaning the config does nothing. The debug mode does nothing, the log is empty beside "micro started".
Version: 2.0.14.
Try the file, just try to delete the first line.
baseof.html

[Andriamanitra]

This issue is caused by the slowness of the syntax highlighter (specifically when a file has long lines). In your case the problem seems to stem from the rules to highlight quoted strings inside opening tags in the html syntax (html.yaml#L16-L31). Performance problems with the syntax highlighter are a known issue (see #3127 and its linked issues).

As a temporary workaround you could copy html.yaml to ~/.config/micro/syntax/html.yaml and comment out those two rules (or just disable syntax highlighting altogether). You could also build micro from source with changes from #3127, although that PR may break syntax highlighting in some cases.

[JoeKar]

@Andriamanitra is right.
The actual syntax highlighter has a absolutely poor performance when it comes to long lines and things like repetitive HTML tags etc.
Hopefully we/I can get back to this before the next release.

[Neko-Box-Coder]

I have had this issue before when opening a minified file.

Do we have a line length limit for the current syntax highlighter?

[JoeKar]

No, we don't have.
This comment describes it very well, why this happens. And even "short" (not very long) lines can take minutes to be highlighted on low-end machines.