NyanCat causing typing lag

[Banjerr]

After disabling all my packages individually I discovered that NyanCat was the culprit of the a fairly bad typing lag. I really love this NyanCat package and hate to think of removing it, but the lag is really pretty severe. Any ideas what could be causing this?

[wiggin15]

I think it's because the Nyan plugin takes advantage of a quirk in Mac that is not optimized.
The Nyan font is installed on the system, but no one tells the program to use it, and it works anyway. My theory is that the operating system looks through all available fonts for the characters that are used in the plguin, and eventually finds the Nyan font and uses it. This is probably not cached or optimized and this causes the lag - so essentially this is a Mac issue.
There is an alternative but it's not perfect - it changes the font of the text in the status bar. You can try it: the following works on Sublime Text 3 with the default theme:

• Using Package Control, install a package called PackageResouceViewer.
• From the Command palette, select PackageResourceViewer: Extract Package
• Select Theme - Default
• Open the file: ~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Packages/Theme - Default/Default.sublime-theme
• In the first section (class "label_control"), add the following line: "font.face": "Nyan"
• Restart Sublime

I know that the options are not perfect but I'm not sure what I can do about this :/
Let me know what you think.
See also #1.