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Mathematica 7.0 uses about 50% of the CPU time on my laptop while in idle, and typing special characters like @ and [ too fast causes Mathematica to crash. Basically, the notebook can't keep up with the formatting and dies.

I would love to use Kate or a similar plain text editing program, and run it as a notebook via the terminal, and saving the output to a PDF or plaintext file.

Is there a text editor that can handle Mathematica syntax highlighting and indentation rules?

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  • Which version of Mathematica? Commented Feb 15, 2011 at 22:39
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    Seems something odd with your installation, or you have a very old machine. The Mma front end should not crash your machine. Ensure you are using only one kernel, for a start. Commented Feb 15, 2011 at 22:52
  • Also, Mma. should not use your CPU at all when idle. Commented Feb 16, 2011 at 6:29
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    Do you have a non-standard default stylesheet installed? I could see a sufficiently messed-up one causing these kinds of problems even with fresh notebooks? Commented Feb 16, 2011 at 13:14
  • Mathematica 7, no nonstandard stylesheet, on a 3 year old laptop. Commented Feb 13, 2012 at 21:01

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Your mention of "Kate" suggests that you are using Linux. There was a bug in the Qt libraries that shipped with Mathematica version 7.0 that caused this load problem on Linux.

See Reload this Page [SOLVED] Mathematica 7 slow under Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) . The thread is about Ubuntu Linux, but I had the same problem on openSUSE.

In that thread, there is a link to an updates library, posted by a Wolfram Research, Inc. employee. That link no longer works, but if you email Wolfram Research, Inc., perhaps they will provide you with the file.

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That might just be it! I am in fact using Mathematica 7 under Ubuntu.
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If you use Emacs, there is a mode for it that allows you to use mma interactively. There are also modes for editing Mathematica code in Emacs. There are some for other editors, for example, here. If you are on Mac OS X, there are such modes for TextMate and BBEdit.

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There's a good chance your notebook is very large if you're having trouble with formatting. If this is true, you should consider breaking things out into packages or separate notebooks at least. The Wolfram Workbench is a very good development environment, especially if you start working with packages more.

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I have the problem with completely new notebooks, unfortunately.
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If you have version 7.0.0 of Mathematica you might want to contact Wolfram Research about getting 7.0.1

Also see if this applies to you:

http://support.wolfram.com/kb/370

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If you want to use Kate, then you can get a syntax highlighting and indentation rules file for Mathematica here. Alternatively, you could try using Wolfram Workbench which is a plugin for Eclipse designed for writing Mathematica code.

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