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Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

> Fast 4K: Bold doesn't drop a frame on a 144hz 4K monitor, using <1 CPU core

> Responsive: Input latency is <5ms, UI and GDB responds instantly

I can't say that I've ever considered frame rate when choosing a text editor.

It's a common problem, which is why it's also a commonly solved problem. Sublime Text has been GPU accelerated for over a decade, there's multiple GPU-accelerated terminal emulators for all the terminal-based editors, VSCode is GPU accelerated, …

VSCode is only GPU accelerated in the same way every website is GPU accelerated - text rendering is done using the DOM. Every program on your computer is GPU accelerated in that sense.

> text rendering is done using the DOM.

And most of the animations, and layouting. So "only" all the performance hotspots.

> Every program on your computer is GPU accelerated in that sense.

No, not really. At least not on win32 and anything Linux/BSD-y, some toolkit( version)s can do it, but that by no means implies every program uses it.

And the terminal. (gpu-rendered by default for ~4 years now)

I wish we could just all agree that there are some people who don't notice slight lag, and people who genuinely notice and are distracted by it.

Of course it's fine to ask why something like this project exists if you don't know. But I feel like the discussions tend to outgrow that and end up at "I don't need it so why should anyone care".

> I wish we could just all agree that there are some people who don't notice slight lag, and people who genuinely notice and are distracted by it.

This is literally the first time I've ever heard of framerate/latency being a concern in a text editor.

I mean, I get that it's annoying when your machine is chugging hard and there's a half-second delay on every keypress. But generally that means that something's gone wrong and is thrashing the processor, not that your text editor is insufficiently optimized.

I know some people are more sensitive to framerate than others, in games and videos. Maybe there really is someone in the world who craves a solid 144FPS/5ms latency when editing code. But it's news to me.

It is a legitimate thing now, if you can type more than a word per minute you'll notice that many apps are not able to keep up. The most common offenders seem to be Electron apps. IDEs sometimes struggle as well.

I think slowly enough and have a fast enough terminal that it's never the bottleneck. My first modem was 300 / 1200 baud so even a janky wi-fi connection is just fine.

At 4K, naive implementations for text rendering no longer cut it.

But on the other side of the coin naive GPU acceleration ends up with poor latency despite ‘not dropping a frame’

5ms input latency is a dubious claim, what really matters is input to photon / end-to-end latency

I wholeheartedly agree.

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