There are (at least) two different things people mean when talking about terminal performance. What's measured above is latency, i. e. the time from keypress to

There are (at least) two different things people mean when talking about terminal performance. What's measured above is latency, i. e. the time from keypress to the letter appearing on screen. I must say I rarely actively notice any delay, except when the system is slow or I'm working remotely and the delay is above, say, 1/3 of a second. I was, however, surprised by how notable no delay can be if you ever get to experience it. In my case, this was typing in an UEFI shell. I can't measure the delay there, and it's surprising that the difference from 5.0ms to, at best, 0ms is noticeable at all. There is also throughout. Some programs have real problems rendering large amounts of output, i. e. when tail'ling logs. This was a significant problem with Hyper, for example, but they have changed the backend library and it's fine now. I believe the reason here is usually a lack of bouncing, i. e. rendering for every new character even if they arrive faster than the refresh cycle. It's not entirely unreasonable that rendering takes some time. Terminals have evolved and, as but one example, character widths now vary even when using monospaced fonts (non-ascii characters, emojis, whatever). Then, there are fancy additions like ligatures, transparency effects, etc.