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by jauntywundrkind 816 days ago
It's not like the typing latency is blocking. You can keep typing and issuing commands. The screen will catch up. I feel like anything under 50ms (20fps) is probably fine; the other various feedbacks like tree-sitter and LSP and what-not will probably be bigger bottlenecks anyhow. (Ed: whoa, uh, was surprised how slow these editors are, but that seems to be for full screen / little-whitespace redraws?).

As a vim user I can be going full steam ahead without looking at feedback. People used to come by and ask, how do you read that screen, everything is so small, and in jest I'd say I don't need to, I already have perceived everything there. My internal model of where I am and where I want to go and what I want to change is only semi-gated on seeing things. I'm not particularly great at navigating between things, but it still feels like a lot of this moving-between-things and changing-things-around stuff is pushed down to a semi-subconscious layer. The brain thinks and somehow the fingers do, and it doesn't feel like I'm really paying attention as these things happen.

One of my favorite pieces of anticipation and matching, that I haven't done in a decade, is Mass Effect 2, which had a pretty neat "hacking" mini-game that involved trying to recognize which of multiple windows of scrolling code was the "right" of code, from shape. Something about that really spoke to me as one of the finer arts of coding, of pattern recognition, of being able to discern place & identify patterns & location quickly from lo-fi moving screens. Being able to navigate code & yourself by look and feel is awesome. https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Bypass#Hacking

Terminals ought to be fast though. We should expect it. I respect that. Some of these terminals do seem unreasonably slow, and that should be improved. And maybe ghostty just rocks everyone & we all find we're way better after it, after terminals get way faster, but I also expect there's rapidly diminishing rapidly returns somewhere. But it'd be cool to set up on a 540 Hz monitor with a fast as sin emulator and find out if that's true or not.