 <p>If the other suggestions don't work, it may be a problem with your terminal. My gnome-terminal on Ubuntu was scrolling much slower than PuTTY with the same file.</p> <p>If you're using Ubuntu's default gnome-terminal, you might want try another terminal program. urxvt both worked for me (terminator had similar problems):</p> <pre><code>$ sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode $ urxvt </code></pre> <p>The major downside is that it doesn't look very good. You can try the advice <a href="http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2009/11/how-make-urxvt-look-gnome-terminal/" rel="nofollow">here</a> to make it look a bit better</p> <p>References:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2864084/slow-tab-switching-in-vim-with-large-terminal">Slow tab switching in Vim with large terminal</a></li> <li><a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/71664/the-gnome-terminal-is-very-slow-in-gnome-3">The GNOME Terminal is very slow in GNOME 3 [AskUbuntu]</a></li> </ul> <p>Edit: It seems that the real solution for me may be to stop full-screening my terminal when using vim.</p>