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Comment by setr | Hacker News Reader

However, most of that should be done in the background — it shouldn’t affect your actual text input speed. Auto-format is more along the lines of something that could be blocking, but we’re not dealing with latex problems as to be significant

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Even putting that aside, just showing text on a screen is much slower on modern PCs then older ones, since you have a far more complicated graphics stack and latency at several added steps.

I remember an article a couple of years ago where someone rigged up a camera to measure key press to screen update on different machines and the results were eye opening.

edit: found it http://danluu.com/input-lag/. The Apple ][ ties for first place with an iPad Pro.

Are you referring to this submission? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23369999 Outstanding article. Total shame it only got 100 upvotes.

Related, my favourite thread to come out of the queer tech circles:

"Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983" https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/927593460642615296.html

Google Maps is a truly horrendous interface. It's pretty, it's well built, but it's fundamentally a horrible UX.

I find myself frequently bamboozled until I stop and try and determine which mode I'm in. Navigation behaves differently to browsing, which behaves differently to searching, which behaves differently to viewing an individual result. I'll be thrown from one mode to another and never feel in control of the app.

I hate it with passion. Clicking a photo on a café in the main view, horrendous because it does not actually open the photo, nor the overview on the café screen. Have to be on the photos screen for the photo to open up full screen.

Pressing on some place while being in other than top mode.

The back button experience.

And the bottom drawer, no idea when I should pull it up or down, or if I am currently in it.

One thing that's illuminating is go to chrome://settings/content/all and sort by "data stored" to see how much local storage websites use. Stuff like vice.com needing 100mb of space on your hard drive for who knows what purpose.

Wow, thanks for the tip, never occured to me to do that.

There were websites I had never heard of using hundreds of megs. Also acehardware.com for some reason using hundreds of megs.

Also Github "community" forums and Travis "community" forums (I don't use travis anyore) using hundreds of megs. Are some websites just caching the entirety of every page you look at in local storage? How rude.

> The Apple ][ ties for first place with an iPad Pro.

* When used with an Apple Pencil (30ms). When used with touch it drops to 70ms.

Also, it's worth noting that there's a very limited list of devices tested there and it heavily skews Apple.

Another fascinating look into text on computer screens is this article: https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/. Just goes to show that text rendering is actually absurdly complex, unless you drastically restrict the problem space.

This sometimes makes me think we're still on the skeuomorphism phase of text. Its more and more complex to render realistic looking with proper illumination and textured faux leather for your UI until until you just admit you're rendering a ui on a screen and then you're back to colored rectangles. We're still trying to render ideas and words resembling handwriting and print press characters, until we embrace screens and render arial and images or even monospaced fonts which are perfectly readable (I do that all day long on my code editor)

And then comes unicode and all the simplicity is gone again as the rest of the world uses more than 26 letters.

> until we embrace screens and render arial and images or even monospaced fonts that are perfectly readable

This is part of what I meant when I said "drastically restrict the problem space".

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/193480622533120001?...

I’m pretty sure that none of these latency benchmarks are showing that text input speed is affected. You can definitely input more than 1 character every 40ms in modern “slow” text editors.

The question isn't about throughtput but latency.

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