@Kaartic Would you mind rephrasing the title of the task to specify exactly what is wrong with the syntax highlighter, instead of "tweak it"? (e.g. "syntax highlighting is slow on low-end devices")

Adding a few notes about wiki-text that I gathered.

By asking questions in the mailing list[1], I came to know of the following,

• Wiki-text is not a regular language. This rules out the possibility of using regular expressions. (not completely, though)
• In the context of parsing, it's not even context-free.
• In the context of syntax highlighting it could be considered to be somewhere close to a context-free language.

Conclusions

• As stated before it's not possible to use regular expression to identify and highlight wiki-text syntax. IOW, the current implementation, which behaves like a PDA, can't be changed as it would possibly trade-off the correctness of the output.
• Consider running the syntax highlighter in a separate thread thus preventing it from hindering the interaction of the user. This would streamline the experience a little as it shouldn't block the main thread, anymore.

Links to mailing list threads
Wikitech-l
Mediawiki-l

Removing the wordings that say I would work on this to allow anyone interested to take this up!

Looks good to me on 2.7.50419-beta-2022-08-29

It appears faster to me, but I also have a Pixel 5 so I am not the target for it. @Clovermoss would love to know if the editor for a long article has improved performance wise for you.