Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure update rate is that important. Subsecond sure, but 33Hz seems overspecified for showing ascii that occasionally scrolls a little. Maybe critical for mouse pointer IDEs?

View on HN

Yes, mouse pointer is among major articles driving refresh rate demand. Code auto completion/hinting is another one. But these are not essential for every workflow, there are many people who don't really need these. The most itchy thing is waiting for a letter to appear on the screen after you press a key - everyone wants this real time but some people still can tolerate a delay.

In the end it is about latency. A common example for me would be multireplace, where I select a word, ctrl + d through all instances and replace them. The second step will present me with multiple instaces of often wildly differnt usages of one word per second. This being sluggish or unreadable would be a dealbreaker for me, personally.

I can imagine that a somewhat responsive display would also be important for vim users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com