[cturner]

Haha. When I first this, I thought your problems might be from editing large files with syntax highlighting switched on. Or doing PHP or JSP, which I've found to struggle in the past. But then I saw the username.

Indeed, if you're writing lots of code with hardly any newlines (like k lang), you will probably have performance issues with vim.

    > It also has terrible defaults

This can vary from distribution-to-distribution. Certainly the default debian setup comes with annoyingly intrusive defaults, some of them used to have an impact on speed. Three settings you probably want in your $HOME/.vimrc on debian:

    filetype indent off
    filetype plugin off
    filetype plugin indent off

[this might be obsolete - that config is more than a decade old]