4 ms·

Text editing on that 100Mhz computer felt responsive... Of course it did, because you were only editing the text. If you switch off syntax highlighting, lintin

Text editing on that 100Mhz computer felt responsive... Of course it did, because you were only editing the text. If you switch off syntax highlighting, linting, autocomplete, type checking, git integration, spell checking, grammar checking, and everything else your editor is doing then you can experience the joy of fast typing again. A 4GHz CPU is only 40 times faster than a 100MHz CPU (not that clock speed is the important bit here, but whatever), but you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key. And then you complain that it's too slow!

TheDong 4y ago
There's not an option to switch various features off in many contexts. It is a requirement imposed upon me that I write documents in notion, and that text editor doesn't let me import locally written files since it doesn't have any lossless textual representation. I can't avoid the laggy text editor. It's a requirement that I use slack, and no combination of settings for the browser or desktop client seems to stop massive input lag. Typing into iOS or android's keyboard, in any text box, is an experience with very noticeable lag. I know that the computer is doing thousands of times more things than my older computer did, but I don't want it to do that stuff and there's no way to turn it off while still participating in modern society (i.e. using a cell phone and working at a company).
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  I don't know if you've tried this, and it might very well not be easier per se, but you can separate writing your text from the "typesetting" by composing in a barebones editor and then pasting that text into wherever you need to display the text. I don't know if something as barebones as notepad exists for phones, but the method I've described might make your experience better on a desktop.
dmitriid 4y ago
> but you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key. [citation needed]
ptero 4y ago
Emacs on my first computer, an i486 with a whopping 33 MHz of compute power had no trouble with syntax highlighting, autocomplete and spell checking. The problem with slowness is in the design, not inproved functionality. The root cause is that modern software runs a ton of checks for every keystroke, tries to talk to the mothership every second and is designed to advertise and upsell instead of solving actual user problems.
- cogman10 4y ago
  TBF, Emacs/vim today with pretty much every feature turned on also don't feel sluggish. I think the 2 issues hitting modern text editors are they are FAR too synchronous (they are doing the syntax highlighting, fonts, etc, with every keystroke rather than in the background). And rendering has gotten WAY too nuts. Seems like all modern text editors are full blown web browsers, usually so they can be easily cross platform.
tashbarg 4y ago
A modern 4GHz CPU is not only 40 times faster. It is a few thousand times faster than a 100MHz CPU back from the days. Probably not 20,000, but at least 2,000 times faster seems reasonable. And responsiveness back then was so good, because your program was very close to hardware with very little in between if not running completely free from OS abstractions.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >your program was very close to hardware with very little in between if not running completely free from OS abstractions This! It also meant that it was very very easy for any program or misbehaving driver to completely crash your system. Not to mention all the security implications of every app having direct hardware access.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    But when I go look at my text editor being slow, I can see that the amount of CPU time spent dealing with the kernel is less than a tenth of it. So that's not the reason.
    - tashbarg 4y ago
      That's not how latency or responsiveness works. Dan Luu did cool experiments with input lag (https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/).
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        It's a much better estimate than hand waving about memory isolation. If we want to talk about how things work directly, my program can get things to the GPU in far less than a millisecond. The safety layers are not the problem.
- jameshart 4y ago
  Can you show your working on this? Because a 100MHz CPU can do 100,000,000 things a second, and a 4GHz CPU can do 4,000,000,000 things a second, and if my math's right, that means the 4GHz CPU can do 40 times as many things a second at the 100MHz CPU. Now, you might argue 'the 4GHz CPU is multicore!', and so sure, maybe we're up to 8 times 40, which is, I'm pretty sure, 320. And maybe you'll say that the cache is bigger, so you'll be able to keep the data pipelines full and get more done on the faster CPU. But how are you getting to 'at least 2,000'?
goodpoint 4y ago
> you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key If hinting, spellchecker and autocompletion takes so much computation you have terrible tooling. This kind of functions existed 25 years ago and they were real-time.
TheBigSalad 4y ago
40 times faster seems fast on paper, but honestly I would love a CPU 4 million times faster.
Dylan16807 4y ago
No excuse for any of those things to slow down the actual typing. And a lot of those computers did do fancy checking, and a modern CPU can do ten times the instructions per clock on top of having 6-8 cores.

TheDong 4y ago

There's not an option to switch various features off in many contexts. It is a requirement imposed upon me that I write documents in notion, and that text editor doesn't let me import locally written files since it doesn't have any lossless textual representation. I can't avoid the laggy text editor. It's a requirement that I use slack, and no combination of settings for the browser or desktop client seems to stop massive input lag. Typing into iOS or android's keyboard, in any text box, is an experience with very noticeable lag. I know that the computer is doing thousands of times more things than my older computer did, but I don't want it to do that stuff and there's no way to turn it off while still participating in modern society (i.e. using a cell phone and working at a company).

beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
I don't know if you've tried this, and it might very well not be easier per se, but you can separate writing your text from the "typesetting" by composing in a barebones editor and then pasting that text into wherever you need to display the text. I don't know if something as barebones as notepad exists for phones, but the method I've described might make your experience better on a desktop.

dmitriid 4y ago

> but you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key. [citation needed]

ptero 4y ago

Emacs on my first computer, an i486 with a whopping 33 MHz of compute power had no trouble with syntax highlighting, autocomplete and spell checking. The problem with slowness is in the design, not inproved functionality. The root cause is that modern software runs a ton of checks for every keystroke, tries to talk to the mothership every second and is designed to advertise and upsell instead of solving actual user problems.

cogman10 4y ago
TBF, Emacs/vim today with pretty much every feature turned on also don't feel sluggish. I think the 2 issues hitting modern text editors are they are FAR too synchronous (they are doing the syntax highlighting, fonts, etc, with every keystroke rather than in the background). And rendering has gotten WAY too nuts. Seems like all modern text editors are full blown web browsers, usually so they can be easily cross platform.

tashbarg 4y ago

A modern 4GHz CPU is not only 40 times faster. It is a few thousand times faster than a 100MHz CPU back from the days. Probably not 20,000, but at least 2,000 times faster seems reasonable. And responsiveness back then was so good, because your program was very close to hardware with very little in between if not running completely free from OS abstractions.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>your program was very close to hardware with very little in between if not running completely free from OS abstractions This! It also meant that it was very very easy for any program or misbehaving driver to completely crash your system. Not to mention all the security implications of every app having direct hardware access.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  But when I go look at my text editor being slow, I can see that the amount of CPU time spent dealing with the kernel is less than a tenth of it. So that's not the reason.
  - tashbarg 4y ago
    That's not how latency or responsiveness works. Dan Luu did cool experiments with input lag (https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/).
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      It's a much better estimate than hand waving about memory isolation. If we want to talk about how things work directly, my program can get things to the GPU in far less than a millisecond. The safety layers are not the problem.
jameshart 4y ago
Can you show your working on this? Because a 100MHz CPU can do 100,000,000 things a second, and a 4GHz CPU can do 4,000,000,000 things a second, and if my math's right, that means the 4GHz CPU can do 40 times as many things a second at the 100MHz CPU. Now, you might argue 'the 4GHz CPU is multicore!', and so sure, maybe we're up to 8 times 40, which is, I'm pretty sure, 320. And maybe you'll say that the cache is bigger, so you'll be able to keep the data pipelines full and get more done on the faster CPU. But how are you getting to 'at least 2,000'?

goodpoint 4y ago

> you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key If hinting, spellchecker and autocompletion takes so much computation you have terrible tooling. This kind of functions existed 25 years ago and they were real-time.

TheBigSalad 4y ago

40 times faster seems fast on paper, but honestly I would love a CPU 4 million times faster.

Dylan16807 4y ago

No excuse for any of those things to slow down the actual typing. And a lot of those computers did do fancy checking, and a modern CPU can do ten times the instructions per clock on top of having 6-8 cores.