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Comment by eichin | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, if the system I'm using has excessive latency (more of a 90s problem than today) precision means even when I do mistype, I'm "feeling" it and backspacing, not seeing them (since they haven't echoed yet.)

It's definitely about getting to the point where you're not thinking about typing, you're thinking about words/sentences/lines of code (or higher.)

I particularly noticed this when going from perl to python - in perl you were typing fewer characters, in python you could use more mainline english typing and not care that you were using more keystrokes...

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> if the system I'm using has excessive latency (more of a 90s problem than today) precision means even when I do mistype, I'm "feeling" it and backspacing, not seeing them (since they haven't echoed yet.)

Perhaps I'm just overly sensitive but if the input latency from keypress to echoing is consciously perceptible then I consider that already unusably slow. I can't imagine using a setup like that regularly. Special case being something like a slow SSH connection, where I do have to just "feel" it and proactively correct mistakes, but I fortunately don't regularly have to connect to servers more than about 200 mi away.

yeah, I mean, when you get a certain adeptness at typing, you don't need to look at the keyboard OR the screen. I've answered verbal questions looking at the person, while finishing typing a sentence about something else (and used to do so pretty regularly when I worked in the office). The maximum tier is being able to backspace the correct number of characters back to the mistake.... hahah (not something I've really managed, that I can recall)

Ctrl-w or ctrl-backspace backspaces away the whole word and then you can just retype it. Often faster than trying to continue somewhere in the middle.

Ooh, somehow didn't ever think of that - that's definitely the preferred way for me to go about it - thanks!

On a slow ssh connections, I prefer to close my eyes while typing, to avoid distraction by the delay on screen. I have better accuracy this way

Btw, you can use mosh to hide the latency of SSH. https://mosh.org/

Lucky you. In my previous job I had to work many hours a day over SSH or even RDP on servers an ocean away (servers in the SF region, I worked remotely from europe).

One thing I used to do to every computer I owned was to turn the keyboard repeat rate up to the max. Made typing feel much faster.

Have you tried SSH over Mosh? (or rather, mosh over ssh)

>if the system I'm using has excessive latency (more of a 90s problem than today)

Hmm? If anything a lot of modern software is worse even from 80s latency, from extra processing going on in the editor, all the way to inefficient polling and scan rate in keyboards, USB latency, monitor refresh latency (next frame, 60fps = ~16ms wait if you're unlucky and press towards the start of a previous refresh) and so on. And that's not even accounting for extra layers like Electron.

https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

Sure, https://danluu.com/input-lag/ has probably done the most thorough review of this. But in the 90s, remote work for me meant a lot of interactive sessions from Boston to the Bay Area, and this decade, it means "pull all of the code locally and build it locally" because terabyte SSDs are free and I still use emacs :-)

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