[dahart]

Except that the big difference is the audio and the hand-eye coordination part.

You can more easily hear a 10-20ms delay than you can see one, it's a physical feature of our human hardware. And hand-eye coordination tasks are all about anticipating an event. Hitting or catching a baseball for example, we can see it coming, the pattern of it's trajectory is what allows us to compensate for the 100ms of delay in our nervous system & is brain and allow us to have 1ms accuracy.

Neither of those is true for typing. Don't get me wrong; I want lower latency in my terminals and editors. I just don't buy that it's particularly important until the latency hits a threshold of badness, which is probably around 100ms. People largely aren't complaining about terminal latency nearly as much as they complain about video game latency, even though both are widely used.

The reason guitar hero has latency adjustment controls and almost no other games do is because they're mixing audio with hand-eye coordination tasks. I can very easily tell the difference between 5ms of delay in Guitar Hero. But I have no idea what my terminal latencies are, and I generally don't care until it stalls more than probably 200ms. It makes a very subtle responsiveness difference when there's an extra 30ms latency while I type, but it doesn't make a large functional difference or compromise my ability to type in any easily felt or measurable way. With Guitar Hero, on the other hand, I drastically lose my ability to play the game when the latency is off by 20ms.

Anyway, I appreciate the response & discussion, but I still want to hear a stronger justification for typing latency being very important. There might be one, I just don't think I've heard it yet.