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Comment by KerrAvon | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but in MS Word on an 8088 you were editing in DOS text mode.

Markdown+ is parsing and rendering your Markdown in real time. It may be slower than it needs to be, I haven’t used it and don’t know, but it’s doing a lot more work than 1982-era MS Word was.

You can still get blazing fast speed for even gigabytes of Markdown if you use instead use something like BBEdit on a current Mac, which would be the equivalent modern user experience.

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All that parsing and rendering can be done in the background, not grinding the UI to a halt. As soon as I strike a key on my keyboard, the letter should appear. Instantly. (Ok, in 20ms or 40ms or whatever)

If I'm actively editing a markdown file, I do not need for it to fire off a re-render on each keystroke. It can wait 500ms before starting to do it, and cancel if I hit another key in the meantime. If I start typing after it has started rendering, then go ahead and finish that cycle while still showing me what I type in real time.

However these events are scheduled, the appearance of my typed characters on the screen is going to always be the priority. There's no reason to block UI while doing this.

I use Thunderbird mail. It often freezes for several seconds while typing text. This is ordinary behavior for modern software. I'm not excusing it, it's just that it's hardly exclusive to Microsoft.

TB is a multithreaded program, but it isn't very good at using it effectively. I've learned through bitter experience to not touch a key or the mouse when it is getting messages.

I've never used Word for DOS. The oldest I've used it "seriously" was word 97 on windows 95 or 98 on a 100 MHz 486. Not book-length documents, but comfortably in the dozens of pages. That thing would fly.

Modern Word lags on a two-page document on an 8 core xeon with 64 GB of RAM. Same PC can run modern games at 4k@60 FPS.

I can agree that maybe modern Word "does more work" than Word 97. But as another commenter said: WTF is that work? And do we even need it?

As a user, all I see is that modern Word's interface has buttons all over the place, taking up half my screen. And when I grab the scroll-bar, it won't scroll until some time after I've released it. Word 97 managed to scroll the contents as I moved the bar just fine.

It also takes forever to start-up on an SSD so fast it can move multiple times the size of that old 486's whole hard drive in one second. WTF is it loading? And once loaded, why is it so slow, since everything can fit in RAM?

> it’s doing a lot more work than 1982-era MS Word was.

That's the point of gp's comment. The software is doing a lot of "work" that it does not need to do, thanks to poor programming.

Work is activity that helps to achieve a goal. Whatever Win11's Notepad is doing, it is not that.

Markdown parsing can be quite fast. I just benchmarked pulldown-cmark parsing all the Markdown in my blog (10k lines, 1MB) and writing HTML, and it does that in 14ms. Admittedly that's on an M1 Max.

If indeed premature optimization is the root of all evil, then I have lots to atone for.

premature optimization is the root of all evil is the root of all evil.

I think my point was lost on you. Word had code to accommodate the realities of what the application was trying to achieve. This app I mention could trivially be hundreds of times faster just by doing basic things that have been done since before most current SWE were born.

I don't know how it did it, but the old DOS version of MS word actually displayed bold/italic/underline in the DOS terminal. It wasn't WYSIWYG but the display was a bit nicer than Wordstar.

Ha the DOS terminal, that thing where the fullscreen button wouldn't work and you have to right click -> properties -> layout -> change the window size manually until you have something that work ok.

At least, they have fix it in the most recent version of windows ....

I imagine the OP means the dos interface.

For all the 80s (before the first version for Windows) the terminal was the only thing out there, plus the graphic modes. I think that bold/italic/underline only existed in the graphic mode version (EGA.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word

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