How to Fix Typing Lag Issues in InDesign on MacBook Pro M3 Max

I rolled back to 19.5.1 (2024 version) and i am relieved not to have this darn lag (windows 11). This roll back comes after 4 hours of troubleshooting and doing all the things Adobe forums, internet's AI, and Reddit users suggest. It's been a challenge, my job is sometimes all InDesign all day making business proposals. I have experienced 2 or 3 seconds to get the next tool or click the next thing, which seems short, but every 3 seconds I have to wait for 3 seconds for the machine to catch up. Typing in a text box squirts out in segments which is jarring when you can touch type a lot of words per minute and you can see the screen is a word or two behind.  I have a souped up machine with enough ram and memory (I was able to video edit in Premiere without issue) so it's not that. I tried turning off preflight, checked my display settings, made sure there were no large embeds, no large linked files, disabled the contextual toolbar, removed 100 fonts (including a couple with errors), tried a different file, reduced the memory in photoshop (? trying everything here), uninstalled 2025 20.1 and reinstalled it including deleting all preferences, I have no 3rd party items installed right now, and I separated my file from the network on a fast HD to make sure it wasn't connectivity (and it wasn't affecting any other app so I suspected this was not it.) Rolling back until the new version is fixed. Shame because I like to keep up - in fact, I had auto-updates on. At least that is really easy to do and maintains the functionality and offers a conversion window.

Last week I was experiencing a lag with InDesign 2025. The lag went away for me when I visited Photoshop and its preferences and set the amount of RAM it consumes down from 70% (seems a default) to a more reasonable 30% on my macbook pro. Restarted PS and ID and the InDesign 2025 lag was gone.

That seems an unlikely cause, but it seemed to work for me.

Another thing I did was prune back fonts. So, I cannot be certain which step I took helped, or whether they both helped.

How is that for an indefinite assertion?!

I have noticed the exact same behavior as OP. I've uninstalled v20 (2025) for now. 

I thought this lag was related to recent backups and heavy cloud syncing the past few days, but I've noticed the problem persisting today long after all syncs are complete. The lag is only in InDesign. As part of my workflows, I'm working in Illustrator, Chrome, etc., and the problem only exists in InDesign. Every few keystrokes while working in a text frame (typing), the characters just stop... then they catch up in 1-2 seconds. The problem occurs again after a few keystrokes. It's impossible to work on my project (detailed user manual). I've reverted my project files to 2024 for now and I'm uninstalling 2025 (because even setting the "Always open with" setting to default to ID 2024 does not work).

Reporting for visibility and following this thread. 

I had this happen when I had multiple GREP Styles applied to paragraph styles in the story. When I disabled them the lag went away. See if that is the issue.

To disable the GREP Styles I duplicated the paragraph styles and removed the GREP Style formatting from the duplicates then use Find/Change to apply the duplicate styles. When I was done I used Find/Change again to switch them back. TO make sure I had changed all of them I deleted the duplicate styles. When I was not warned they were in use I knew I had not missed anything. I undid the delete because I wanted to keep the styles for future lag-free edits.

what version of InDesign? is it possible that your InDesign 2024 auto-updated to InDesign 2025 (which just has been released), and therefore you experience this issue in the new version? I saw other users reported similar issue with InDesign 2025. Note: you can re-install InDesign 2024 (19.x) from the Creative Cloud app if you don't have it installed anymore).