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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Sadly we live in a world today where some local code editors could really benefit from CSP because they add 100-200ms of latency to every character you press.

I'm not sure if it's funny or sad that there's more key press latency typing into most local Electron apps than connecting to a Quake 3 server 200 miles away back when I had 56k dial-up in 2000.

If you want to fast forward to today's internet, with an average internet connection it takes around 150ms to ping a server in the Netherlands from California. That's over 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers). Somehow a local key press has the same latency with certain code editors. What have we gotten ourselves into.

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Not just Electron either, writing an email in Outlook frequently gives me half-a-second pauses before the typing catches up with the cursor

Ah, so the Outlook lag isn't just me. This is incredibly frustrating when typing emails. I even have that "intelligent" predictive service turned off and yet, it constantly seizes as if it is trying to work out what I'm saying in an email... Just let me type dammnit!

Actually, there's nothing sad about the state of code editors in the world today. I'm not sure what code editors you're regularly using that is giving you that kind of latency, but there's plenty -- more than ever before, in fact, that definitely don't have this problem (some of which are even electron based!).

my iOS phone freezes approx twice a day for 2 seconds whenever i type text. I remember playing with the keyboard buffer overflow sound when i was playing on my cpc464 (as in 64k of ram and 4Mhz cpu) in the 80s, and it took me longer than that to trigger it.

"The mess we're in" famous talk by joe amstrong should be transformed into a website listing all of those absurdities, as a way to public shame the culprits.

> "The mess we're in" famous talk by joe amstrong

For anyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

Fantastic watch, thanks for recommending. Sad to hear that Joe Armstrong passed away a few weeks ago.

i discovered recently that there could be some progress to be made wrt latency in editors: https://makepad.github.io/makepad/

// This is Makepad, a work-in-progress livecoding IDE for 2D Design. // This application is nearly 100% Wasm running on webGL.

Typing delay is a pet peeve of mine. This is why I have stuck with Sublime and Vim even though there are more powerful editors out there like VsCode or PyCharm.

If you want a fast editor, switch to Sublime 3.

I find VS Code to be just about the only electron-based editor I can use without getting frustrated with typing latency. It's usually not noticeable unless the process is chugging for unrelated reasons.

VS Code is Electron-based, but not Atom-based, thankfully.

vs code typing latency is on the order of 50ms.

its more than necessary but not as bad as you are implying

VS Code is pretty good for an Electron app

Usually that kind of typing lag is caused by something running amok on the machine. Often for me it has been company installed backup software, to which I send SIGSTOP (not SIGKILL or SIGQUIT, since those cause re-start.)

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