Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/13/how-much-keyboard-latency-can.html
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At times I miss 3.1 and the single threaded certainty of being able to fly through keystrokes and know they would perform certain tasks in certain orders. edit: back then I was fine with many seconds of latency because the result was predictable.
Nowadays I feel like I spend way too much time waiting for UI animations and babysitting a given process because I can’t know which clicks/taps were actually caught depending on which moments the system was waiting for a disk swap or network packet.
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THIS!
(“Computers are faster now” me arse.)
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Thankfully, Electron apps allow you to use a browser-based latency simulator right from the comfort of a desktop app!
Truly, ours is an age of infinite progress.
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Latency is why I can’t use vscode. I tried it in good faith for a few weeks, but the difference (vs. e.g. Sublime or vim) is too stark to ignore. Vscode may have all kinds of features, but typing in it is so laggy!
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What exactly do you have against vim?
Also, when your text editor doubles as a full-fledged OS, you may have some unresolved issues. Probably in the form of orphan processes.
Isn’t chaotic neutral best?
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Hey now, modern UIs look at least 300% nicer, and all it took was 5,000% faster hardware. I know it doesn’t run so smoothly but devs can’t waste time on code optimization and product refinement. They work very hard to provide you with an endless stream of unnecessary updates and bloat.
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And this is what I love about Linux on the desktop. I run bare Enlightenment E16 with no desktop environment garbage. It has the features I need and want, and nothing extra. My machines are responsive with very low latency. I’m trying to figure out what to do about Wayland, but I am looking forward to ditching X.
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You don’t even need to install the latency simulator. 
O ms latency.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between ease of use and expected performance.
I still have my Underwood in my office…but never use it. Humans certainly seem to favor the easy path, huh?
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Clearly y’all never communicated at 300 baud. Even cranked up to “the worst” I was thinking, “I’ve been on worse connections.”
Off of my lawn, whippersnappers.
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I didn’t start to care until 200ms, to be honest. I also do not touch type.
I was very glad to know how to make my cursor jump entire words at a time when I needed to fix a typo in the stuff I typed at that speed, though. Cursoring around would have been a nightmare.
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Local echo FTW!
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IIRC, the latency between pressing the keys and the card being punched was negligible.
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I’m putting on my old-man-yells-at-clouds hat. Back in the ancient times, when I was a CS undergrad, we did our coding on a VAX 11/780 running some flavor of Unix. It had, I believe, somewhere around 30 dumb terminals connected to it. Towards the end of the quarter when everyone was working on their final projects the load on the poor machine would get kind of high. When it got over 30 it could take more than 5 minutes to log in. That was annoying latency.
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I use vscode all the time and I don’t see any perceivable lag (and I’m super sensitive to this). Maybe it’s some combination of settings and plugins?
It’s one of the few decently performing Electron apps out there that I use on a regular basis.
One of the first things I do on a computer is go in and turn off as much flashy UI fuckery as I can. Office is a million times faster with animations turned off, and it doesn’t have that awful glassy smooth typing.
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Adding my two cents to this Four Yorkshiremen sketch:
Doing my CS homework on a Prime 6650 was a delight. I usually couldn’t find an unused terminal on campus, but I had the luxury of my Amiga 500 and a 1200 baud modem to dial in from home. That is, when it would connect. It usually took at least 30 minutes of cursing, praying to the computer gods, and various cryptic spells to turn the modem’s horrible screeching into that beautiful connection tone and blessed silence. Then the latency problems would begin. You could type ahead about twenty characters, then cross your fingers and hope it would show up in the terminal window in a few seconds. If it didn’t, you faced a dilemma. Wait longer? Or type it again and chance a buffer overrun, killing your connection and losing all that you’d typed in the last hour and forgotten to save. Ah the good old days…
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