[dleink]

Wow, that's a great way to phrase it. I'm currently setting up a basic laptop with speed like you're describing as a goal. "Confidence in my inputs" is an underrated value in HCI. Of course websites have to implore users to not click on this again while it loads, they don't have confidence in their inputs!

[saurik]

Something actively dropping inputs is an entirely different category of problem than it merely being slow to process them.

[dleink]

Yes, But for "confidence in inputs" the difference doesn't matter.

[saurik]

I honestly don't see that? If it drops inputs, you can't have confidence in your input; but, if it is merely slow to process them, then you don't lose confidence. If you know for sure that something will happen--and even that it will happen in the correct order, as in this case--you can just move on with your life. Have you never worked with a remote text editor over high latency? Or played a musical instrument that had a slow reaction time?

For avoidance of any doubt, I care deeply about my editor latency and agree that those terminals who claim to be "fast" and yet only care about average--not even common--throughout instead of latency misunderstand the problem space... and yet, I still can't say that it is reasonable to lose "confidence in your inputs" if a system is merely slow to process without losing any of your events. If an editor drops any of my inputs at all ever I 100% lose all confidence in what I'm doing; but if it always works then I can close my eyes and still use it without issue!

[mafuyu]

I think this gets at my feelings on latency as well.

Terminal emulators with GPU-accelerated rendering became popular, but I often found the latency to be quite bad. (I eventually settled on Kitty and foot.)

With VS Code in particular, it’s just not designed to be operated via keyboard. With enough effort, you can map/script everything, but many actions translate to opening a pane and then focusing it. It’s an implicit modality switch that often ignores input during the transition. Also, opening a new terminal is oddly slow, I think due to VS Code injecting things into zsh init.

With tmux+nvim, it’s much more predictable. For example, if I think “I want to copy three lines out of this file and paste it into a new shell”, it’s just: `3yy alt+enter ctrl+shift+v`, and I know it’s going to work every time. Not to mention the composability of keybinds in different scenarios.

(Also, hi saurik! Cydia on my OG iPod Touch is a big part of what got me into coding in the first place :)