Laser processing plays an important role in industrial manufacturing, in which a galvanometer scanner (GS) functions as the core component of the laser processing equipment. With the development of the digital system, the GS based on the digital system finds a broader range of potential application. In order to address the slow step-responses of a GS with disturbance and parameter perturbation, the mathematical model of the motor of the GS is derived and a discrete-time sliding-mode variable-structure controller (DSVC) based on a decoupled disturbance compensator (DDC) (DSVC+DDC) is designed. The step-response performance of a GS is the key factor affecting the quality evaluation of laser processing. Experiments are conducted on the step responses of the motor of the GS on a digital experimental platform. The experiment results show that when guaranteeing a steady-state error within 20 urad and an overshoot of less than 5%, the rise time for step-responses in 1% and 10% of the whole stroke is 1 and 2 ms, decreasing by 23% and 58% compared with the reference performance index, which indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed approach can not only compensate for the external disturbance online and improve the step-response speed of the GS, but also relax the traditionally assumed limit of the upper bound of external disturbance to the limit of the change rate of external disturbance, which reduces the difficulty of a practical application. This method has great significance for further applications in high precision machining.