I understand this was an exploratory project, but from a practical perspective, how does this compare with one of the standard terminal-based editors, running in a GPU accelerated terminal emulator like alacritty/etc?
Instead, buy a high-refresh-rate monitor with good pixel response time and input latency. Probably 90% of the people reading this post are on a 60hz display, and many of those monitors may have noticeable input delay (Microsoft found that people can notice even just a few ms input/display delay.) Even just 75 hz or 100hz will feel noticeably nicer.
There are a couple of pretty inexpensive ~95hz monitors aimed at office users, but 2.7k ~150hz gaming monitors aren't that expensive if you shop carefully. Even nice ones with IPS and good color gamut/calibration.
Everything is nicer with higher refresh rates. Scrolling through web pages, file listings, editing text files, terminal sessions. Same is true of gaming mice; if you do a lot of mousework, a quality "gaming" wireless mouse is durable, has virtually zero input lag, great tracking, very accurate response to quick "flicks" letting you move windows and such around, and high polling rates. Default on most mice is around 120hz. Yes, you can tell the difference - though I have my mouse set to either 250hz or 500hz when not gaming, I forget which.
Edit: just to note that someone pointed out keyboards matter, too, and they're right Some keyboards can have over 50ms input delay, which when you think about it, is fucking nuts in the year 2022.
RTINGs tests for keyboard latency and their idea of "high latency" for a gaming keyboard can be 10ms. The difference between that and the fastest (1-2ms) keyboards is probably not worth selecting for over features like ergonomics and daily use factors.
RTINGs tests for latency, but I would caution folks to note that "high latency" to them is ~8 or 9ms, which as Dan's tests show, can be almost 10x better than some common keyboards out there.
However, the high-refresh-rate monitor also needs to be supported. I have a 144 hz monitor which works fine with my Windows PC, but when I connect it to my work Macbook, it goes back to 60 hz. In the MacOS display settings, there is a dropdown for the refresh rate, but it only lets me choose between 50 and 60 hz... :(
Currently I'm using mlterm which is slower than Kitty again by a significant margin, and I still don't notice the difference in day to day use.
(xterm, st and gnome-terminal are all slower than Kitty by huge margins; of the terminals on my system (I have a lot because I tested a bunch of them a while back...) there's a performance difference in terms of rendering throughput of at least a factor of 10, and yet even the slowest once are perfectly fine for most use other than the cat large file test)
Ever since the Amiga days text rendering at sufficient speed to bitmap displays has been a solved problem, with only scrolling accelerated by the blitter, and resolution and number of bits per pixel has increased at a much slower pace than CPU performance since then.
Most X terminals use one of ~3 different basic approaches to glyph rendering anyway (as shown by redirecting them through xtruss to log the X requests they make), and their throughput still varies from far faster than Kitty (as per rxvt) to far slower, so apart from possibly the fastest ones, most of the x terminals spends most of their time outside of their rendering code.