I don't disagree. Although a good rope implementation can handle that. Ropes are nice because it doesn't matter where you edit. Gap buffers have to copy around

I don't disagree. Although a good rope implementation can handle that. Ropes are nice because it doesn't matter where you edit. Gap buffers have to copy around a lot of data if you are editing in different places. Btw the memory overhead is not that much. It's just the memory needed to keep the pointers between the nodes. So I'm talking 10% increase or something.