4 ms·

There finally starts to be consciousness about input and output latency for GUI applications. Xi sounds like an editor I'd love to use. Latency while typing is

There finally starts to be consciousness about input and output latency for GUI applications. Xi sounds like an editor I'd love to use. Latency while typing is a jarring experience.

EddieRingle 9y ago
You might be interested in this article from a JetBrains developer who implemented zero-latency typing in IDEA: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
- kakarot 9y ago
  I first switched to Webstorm in early 2016, on a Windows laptop at the time, and the latency was absolutely horrific. I'm talking 100-800ms. I was so off-put, even after changing a few settings, that I returned to Notepad++ for a while. I'd never been so disgusted at a piece of software. It's the 21st century and we're dealing with input latency in a text editor??? Eventually they seemed to fix things and it started running better, and now on Linux it runs buttery smooth and is a joy to use, but clearly they were not finished with their work by the time this article was published.
  - rplnt 9y ago
    I bought (though in a sale) PyCharm few years back, without trying it much before (my bad), and found it really really bad. Used maybe 12 hours of my one year license. Somehow got accustomed to to pretty much vanilla Sublime, mostly because I can't seem to get the language "intelligence" plugins to work correctly.
    - kakarot 9y ago
      You should give PyCharm another go. If you don't have a license anymore, JetBrains offers a free community version. It is more than enough to suit my needs. What did you find bad about it? If it was just input latency, that's fixed.
      - rplnt 9y ago
        The UI overall was slow (I wouldn't remember if input delay was part of it). It's been in 2012 or 2013 I think, so yeah, I would hope they got better at it :)
kyrra 9y ago
Xi backend repo: https://github.com/google/xi-editor https://github.com/google/xi-editor Fuschia front-end client for Xi: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/topaz/+/master/app/xi/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/topaz/+/master/app/xi/
- cmyr 9y ago
  The official frontend is a Cocoa/Swift app: https://github.com/google/xi-mac https://github.com/google/xi-mac
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    > Native UI. Cross-platform UI toolkits never look and feel quite right. The best technology for building a UI is the native framework of the platform. On Mac, that’s Cocoa. Thumbs up!
taeric 9y ago
People used to put a lot of effort into minimizing latencies. In large because they had to. However, you almost always land in an effectively cooperatively multitasking environment if you want truly lightning fast latency. Just after that, you are just reimplmenting schedulers and other preemptive tools. All of which just gives a hot target to a few particularly scheduled jobs that every developer feels their stuff has to happen in.
weinzierl 9y ago
> Latency while typing is a jarring experience. This is so true. I grew up on the Commodore 64. The machine was usually pretty responsive, but when I typed too quickly in my word processor it sometimes got stuck and ate a few characters. I used to think: "If computers were only fast enough so I could type without interruption...". If you'd asked me back then for a top ten list what I wished computers could do, this would certainly have been on the list. Now, 30 years later, whenever my cursor gets stuck I like to think: "If computers were only fast enough so I could type without interruption..."
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Recent article: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/

There finally starts to be consciousness about input and output latency for GUI applications. Xi sounds like an editor I'd love to use. Latency while typing is a jarring experience.

EddieRingle 9y ago

You might be interested in this article from a JetBrains developer who implemented zero-latency typing in IDEA: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

kakarot 9y ago
I first switched to Webstorm in early 2016, on a Windows laptop at the time, and the latency was absolutely horrific. I'm talking 100-800ms. I was so off-put, even after changing a few settings, that I returned to Notepad++ for a while. I'd never been so disgusted at a piece of software. It's the 21st century and we're dealing with input latency in a text editor??? Eventually they seemed to fix things and it started running better, and now on Linux it runs buttery smooth and is a joy to use, but clearly they were not finished with their work by the time this article was published.
- rplnt 9y ago
  I bought (though in a sale) PyCharm few years back, without trying it much before (my bad), and found it really really bad. Used maybe 12 hours of my one year license. Somehow got accustomed to to pretty much vanilla Sublime, mostly because I can't seem to get the language "intelligence" plugins to work correctly.
  - kakarot 9y ago
    You should give PyCharm another go. If you don't have a license anymore, JetBrains offers a free community version. It is more than enough to suit my needs. What did you find bad about it? If it was just input latency, that's fixed.
    - rplnt 9y ago
      The UI overall was slow (I wouldn't remember if input delay was part of it). It's been in 2012 or 2013 I think, so yeah, I would hope they got better at it :)

kyrra 9y ago

Xi backend repo: https://github.com/google/xi-editor https://github.com/google/xi-editor Fuschia front-end client for Xi: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/topaz/+/master/app/xi/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/topaz/+/master/app/xi/

cmyr 9y ago
The official frontend is a Cocoa/Swift app: https://github.com/google/xi-mac https://github.com/google/xi-mac
- pjmlp 9y ago
  > Native UI. Cross-platform UI toolkits never look and feel quite right. The best technology for building a UI is the native framework of the platform. On Mac, that’s Cocoa. Thumbs up!

taeric 9y ago

People used to put a lot of effort into minimizing latencies. In large because they had to. However, you almost always land in an effectively cooperatively multitasking environment if you want truly lightning fast latency. Just after that, you are just reimplmenting schedulers and other preemptive tools. All of which just gives a hot target to a few particularly scheduled jobs that every developer feels their stuff has to happen in.

weinzierl 9y ago

> Latency while typing is a jarring experience. This is so true. I grew up on the Commodore 64. The machine was usually pretty responsive, but when I typed too quickly in my word processor it sometimes got stuck and ate a few characters. I used to think: "If computers were only fast enough so I could type without interruption...". If you'd asked me back then for a top ten list what I wished computers could do, this would certainly have been on the list. Now, 30 years later, whenever my cursor gets stuck I like to think: "If computers were only fast enough so I could type without interruption..."

mixmastamyk 9y ago
Recent article: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/