Input lag at bottom of long list, but not top

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#1

I’m finishing up a novel written 100% in Dynalist, and I’m quickly becoming a fangirl of this app!

But I’m having a weird problem now that I’m in the editing phase. I do my edits with an apple pencil and scribble handwriting input on the iPad. For some reason this makes me much more efficient in my edits, so I’d like to stick with it.

I do have the entire novel in one list, with about 2000 items and 65,000 words. I only have one chapter expanded or isolated at one time, usually. At the top of the page with about 150 items and 2000 words, the input works like a dream. But near the bottom of the page, it lags pretty badly and drops most of my words.

Why would this happen, if the entire page is loaded into memory and if the display is full of text in both instances? I’m trying to figure out how to work around it, but I’m not familiar enough with web programming and iOS to figure out why this is happening. It occurs in the app as well as in Safari, chrome, and Firefox.

I don’t want to start chopping up my novel into sub-chapter pieces unless absolutely necessary, so any input or ideas about possible alternative workarounds would be greatly appreciated.

#2

I reproduced it on my ipad too. Wow that’s weird. The scribble strokes are all super snappy and smooth (~120hz) on the first item, unusably laggy (~5-10hz) on the last item. Scrolling while typing is still super smooth, it’s just the scribble strokes lagging.

That’s a bummer because I use scribble on dynalist too - easier to insert and delete words with apple pencil than a keyboard.

On mac, both chrome and safari use about 10% cpu typing in first or last node, so no difference there.

I tried reproducing it in another app that uses ‘editable div’ text input html elements, Workflowy, and even with 500 items above, there’s no scribble lag. So it’s not the div elements thats bothering it.

I am super curious what’s causing the lag, can’t find any clue.

The lag seems proportional to how many dynalist nodes are uncollapsed above the node you’re editing. If you can collapse more of your novel above it, you can potentially work around it while staying with 1 document.

#3

Thanks for checking it out, that’s a huge help! I tried it on Notion and am having no problems there, either.

I did some experimenting and found that even with just about 500 words uncollapsed, the lag is noticeable for me on my 2018 ipad pro. That’s not much. Since the novel is pretty much a flat list I’d have to do a bunch of shuffling around every few minutes to make it work.

It’s no biggie, since I realize that this is not exactly a prime use case for dynalist, but up until now, it was so perfect!