WinForms SyntaxEdit control will support Skia and OpenGL rendering
Building on the work described in our recent Code Editor Text Rendering post, we’re taking another major step to enhance clarity, responsiveness, and rendering performance in the WinForms SyntaxEdit control.
In the next release of AlterNET Studio, the WinForms edition of SyntaxEdit will introduce Skia/OpenGL-based rendering, a technology stack originally designed for the Alternet UI and .NET MAUI versions of the control. This upgrade brings a modern GPU-accelerated rendering engine to Windows Forms, resulting in sharper text, smoother scrolling, and up to 50% faster rendering in benchmark tests.
You can see it in action in our demo project: Download the SyntaxEdit Skia/OpenGL Rendering Demo
Why Skia and OpenGL?
Skia is a high-performance, cross-platform 2D graphics library used in Chrome, Android, and many other modern applications. By leveraging OpenGL, Skia can offload most of the rendering workload to the GPU, ensuring that text and graphics render quickly and consistently across resolutions and display setups.
In our internal testing, Skia with OpenGL outperformed the default GDI rendering mode by more than 50%, especially when handling large code files or rapid scrolling operations. The combination of Skia’s hardware acceleration and optimized drawing pipelines provides a smoother, more responsive editing experience in real-world scenarios.
Enhanced Double Buffering for Flicker-Free Editing
In addition to GPU acceleration, the upcoming SyntaxEdit introduces optimized double buffering by default. This minimizes redraw flicker and screen tearing, ensuring that all text updates occur off-screen before being displayed. The result is cleaner, more stable rendering, even under continuous typing or fast viewport movement.
Consistent Rendering Across Platforms
Integrating Skia rendering also unifies the text rendering pipeline between the WinForms and cross-platform versions of SyntaxEdit, ensuring consistent results across Windows, macOS, and Linux. This alignment allows developers to deliver uniform rendering quality and performance across all supported platforms, simplifying code maintenance and testing.
Summary
With Skia/OpenGL rendering and optimized double buffering, the WinForms SyntaxEdit control achieves a new level of performance and visual accuracy. These enhancements deliver smoother scrolling, GPU-accelerated rendering, and a modern editing experience that rivals the best professional IDEs - all within your own .NET applications.
This update reflects our ongoing efforts to make AlterNET Studio the most powerful, extensible, and visually refined component library for .NET.