requires roughly 2 seconds for a screen update.
Hmm, screen update on my laptop (Pentium M 2.0 GHz, XP pro) is without a noticable delay - even if I run the app from within VMWare (simulating Debian Linux with 512 MB of RAM). Should it be that my CPU is so much faster than yours?
Perhaps, but a 1GHz CPU shouldn't be considered that old (my laptop is a Celeron 400 - now that IS old, but still perfectly good for much of my work). A Pentium M 2.0 GHz runs a good 3-4 times faster than a p3 1ghz. Note, that based on measuring how long it takes to delete 10 characters in a comment at the end (15s), the corrected time is 1.5s/char, so 3-4 times faster is <0.5s which may indeed be fast enough???
VMware won't slow down an application like the regex coach (much) as there are few places were HDD or Hardware (screen, etc.) is accessed. I expect regex coach under VMware runs at around 80-95% of full speed.
Cheers, MaZe.