This is what they said four years ago:
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It’s an excellent article, thank you for sharing it. I hope they don’t change their mind. 
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LOL, because I am cursed with a perpetual curiosity about text and markdown apps I downloaded Paper to try it out. Visually, it’s a beautiful app! I opened a recent document and found it a nice typing experience. But then I opened my OBTF (One Big Text File) and started typing. The cursor hesitated and moved in janky movements across the screen. At 792 KB it’s larger than the average text file. Runestone also chokes on this file. Normally I edit in Textastic and there is no problem with text entry for this file. To compare I hopped over to iA Writer to try editing the OBTF and it’s fairly smooth.
I’ll stick with Textastic. Not only does it easily handle larger files but on the iPad it also has a built-in FTP client which makes for easy upload of blog/html edits. I suppose it’s more comparable to BBEdit.
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Have you tried iA Writer?
Yeah, I started using it right after Ulysses switched to subscription. So, maybe 6 years? Of all the markdown apps I’ve used, iA Writer is the one I’ve stuck with the longest and always gone back to.
Textastic was the app I used alongside of iA Writer, mostly for coding html/css and website management generally. Several months back I decided to take iA Writer off my dock and experiment with Textastic as my only text editor. It’s gone very well. Today was the first time I’ve opened iA Writer in many weeks.
Textastic fully supports Markdown but lacks the tappable formatting shortcut buttons iA Writer has. But I’ve not really missed those as I use an external keyboard and just use the keyboard shortcuts. It looks somewhat utilitarian by comparison but is fairly customizable with themes and fonts. Really, quite a lot that could be said about the app and now that I think about it I’m surprised more iPad users don’t mention it more often.
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I’ve found that most Markdown editors choke on large files. (Including iA Writer, @Bmosbacker)
That’s why I use BBEdit. I haven’t found a large text file it couldn’t handle.
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That surprises me. I would think that plain text files are so small, compared to what one might create in a word processor, there would be no realistic limit. Why would Markdown editors choke on large plain text files?
I’ve never had a file too large for iA Writer. I wonder what the top limit is. Most everything I write in Markdown tends to be up to eight pages, seldom larger. I’m using Scrivener for the book project. I’ve written extremely large documents (e.g., dissertation) in Word or Pages with no issues.
What seems to be the upper limit in size for plain text files?
Well, according to the always reliable ChatGPT 
:
1. Markdown Editor Performance
• Lightweight Editors: Editors like iA Writer, Obsidian, and Typora are optimized for Markdown but may struggle with very large files because they load the entire file into memory.
• Code Editors: Tools like Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text are better suited for handling large files since they are designed for developers and often optimize for performance.
Ulysses seems to get around this. I presume this is because it is a database program and does not load an entire book project into its memory? The same with Scrivener? On the other hand, word processors load the entire file. I’m confused. 
@Bmosbacker, your homework assignment is … Choose your favorite language platform and begin to write your own plain text and Markdown editor. Lots of parsing and display hacks required.
Or read @snelly 's exploration and ultimate abandonment of writing his own plain text editor. Thinking about building a Markdown editor for macOS and iOS - Software - MPU Talk
I’ve opened large files in iA Writer so, in that sense, it works. But the performance is so bad that I would not want to use it.
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Jesse Grosjean (developer of Bike, Taskpaper and Writeroom) has what he calls the Moby Dick test which, in plain text, is a 1.2 MB, 212000 word file. Useful to test markdown readers
You can get the file in markdown, opml and bike formats here.
I tried it on Mweb, Byword, Markedit - and they seemed to deal with it fine - opened fast, did a search instantly and no problem editing. But it was a quick test
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According to Omniscient ChatGPT :
Estimated Practical Limits
| File Size | Pages | Performance on Your MBP |
|---|---|---|
| 1 MB | ~650 | Instant loading in any editor. |
| 10 MB | ~6,500 | Slight lag in rendering-heavy editors (e.g., Typora). |
| 50 MB | ~32,500 | Potential lag or freezing in non-optimized editors. |
| 100 MB+ | ~65,000+ | Usable only in high-performance editors like VS Code or Sublime Text. |
Who hits the practical limit of 650 pages in a text editor?
In iA Writer, I just opened last year’s 2.8 MB roll-up file of all my Daily Notes from 2023. Once the file was loaded, it seemed fairly snappy jumping from the beginning to the end of the file and back again. Even appending a sizable Daily Note didn’t seem to cause it any difficulty. But when I tried making the iA Writer window a little wider, I got repeated beach balls. Saving my changes to the file took quite a while, too.
But still, kudos to the iA Writer team for their app’s performance improvements since the last time I used it.
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Interesting. Ulysses seems to handle things differently. I’m guessing because it is a database program and probably does not load everything into memory at the same time. I’m guessing.
On MacOS, Yyou open a 2GB to 3GB log file and that will test the editors.
BBEdit will smoothly render.
Sublime Text can also perform well but a bit under 2 GB files.
Ultraedit is the monster. It can take files beyond 4GB.
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I’m almost embarrassed that I publicly wrote about doing this and ended up abandoning it. I feel like such a phoney. But I’m a freelancer for a living, and when your normal job is all about the hustle, adding a “side hustle” is like driving for two taxi companies. No fun.
Would be happy to try anybody else’s editor though, were anybody else to try and write one.
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You’re too hard on yourself. You never committed to writing the app. You wrote,
I’m considering learning SwiftUI and Swift so I can build a macOS and iOS app… [emphasis added].”
[/quote]
I also wish there was an offspring of Ulysses + iA Writer. I’ll spare everyone my critique of both, but an app that could combine the best of both would be fantastic.
After giving Ulysses another try recently, I’ve more or less settled on iA Writer for short to medium-length articles and presentation notes, Scrivener for the book project, and Pages for formal reports and the like. iA Writer is nearly perfect for my needs. My only frustrations are the lack of an outline view and Markdown syntax, which is too prominent and distracts from the words I’m writing.
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I agree with @Bmosbacker that you are being too hard on yourself. I completely understand your motivation for wanting to write the perfect text editor. But we have to pick our battles in life. Good luck to all of us in the choices we make!
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Paper is expensive, but excellent.
It just does so many little things right, that it makes writing in other (good) apps painful. The only apps I find to be on par, is Bike and Bear. (I haven’t tried iA that much, though – as I don’t agree on some of their opinionated opinions.)
I wrote a quite thorough review of it a month ago!
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That was a good read. Thanks
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