OK, so it's not the GUI itself or syntax highlighting etc. causing an issue, it's communication with the debugger.
It's all of it, but programming and parsing are the worst offenders. The same occurs on both machines that I use, both I7, both 16GB, one 1TB SSD and the other 768GB, both Windows 10, but this has been the same since I've been using MPLAB X from Windows 7 through 8, 8.1 and now 10, and it's similar behaviour on the half a dozen other machines I've used. The programming thing seems consistently slow across a variety of specs of PC, so I strongly suspect a lot of application turning through JNI with the USB port. The parsing, unsurprisingly, slows down in accordance with machine specs. I just wish you could simply turn it off.
I used MPLAB 8, it's what originally came with my PK2. I tend to debug with the simulator, mainly because MPLAB doesn't support any of the chips I have, so the programming is done via the stand alone app with auto-program enabled.
<scratches head> Do you mean the PK2 doesn't support the chips you're using?
The simulator is indeed much faster. The only thing is there's a limit to what you can do with a simulator if you're developing real time systems, or want to use any non-trivial peripherals.
The version of Java might make a difference. When I've used 32 bit Java on 64 bit Windows it's much slower than 64 bit Java. I think MPLAB has its own copy so maybe see if replacing that makes a difference? As far as I'm aware, if you use 32 Java on a 64 platform, there's some emulation layers it has to use that simply aren't required with 64 Java on a 64 platform.
Maybe, but MPLAB X (thankfully) comes with a pre-baked sandboxed Java, saving us from the nonsense of JRE hell.
Now there's a beer if some Netbeans Guru can figure out how to give a nice clean UI to MPLAB X just like MPLAB Xpress, which is apparently "just" a cloud deployment of MPLAB X.