Typing with pleasure • Hacker News Board

Re: Typing with pleasure

#11

Post by rdancer » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 5:16 PM UTC

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #5

This is a really cool writeup. It's probably worth noting that humans don't notice latency under about 100ms and the table at the end shows all the editors surveyed coming in under that number. That said, I've noticed severe latency problems while trying out Atom, and almost never have problems with Vim (unless I try to edit a massive file in it). But for me the latency problems I notice usually aren't typing ones, b…

You perceive sensory inputs within a 100ms window as occurring simultaneously. That does not mean that you cannot notice the difference between a 10ms latency and 50ms latency. Your may well perceive variations of latency, just not on a conscious level as a delay. The author asserts that high subliminal latency leads to higher discomfort and decreased productivity. I cannot find any studies on this right now, but it should be pretty straightforward to measure experimentally.

Re: Typing with pleasure

#12

Post by noir_lord » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

The improvement with intellij with zero latency on is insane on Linux, I never noticed how slow it was until that point as I generally don't pay much attention to that stuff unless it's horribly slow.

Re: Typing with pleasure

#13

Post by ubercow13 » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 6:01 PM UTC

frankling wrote: post #10

falcolas wrote: post #2

I really enjoyed that write up. The only piece I would love to see added would be the addition of emacs and vim in a native console.

I just did quick measurements for vim 7.4 and emacs 23.4.1 in xterm, rxvt/urxvt, and gnome-terminal. The results depend most strongly on the terminal type. emacs' latency is always a bit (0.1-0.3ms or so) lower than vim's. Apart from that, xterm was around 1.1ms, (u)rxvt around 17.5ms, and gnome-terminal around 26.2ms. I wonder where the delay in rxvt compared to xterm comes from.

Depending how you're measuring it, I believe it could be because urxvt's output is buffered by default whereas xterm's isn't. That may mean 16.7ms (= 1 second / 60Hz) is added to the measured latency, though the extra time would have no effect in practice.

ed: or maybe thats excluded from the measurement but urxvt is double buffered by default?

Re: Typing with pleasure

#14

Post by frankling » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 6:35 PM UTC

ubercow13 wrote: post #13

frankling wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just did quick measurements for vim 7.4 and emacs 23.4.1 in xterm, rxvt/urxvt, and gnome-terminal. The results depend most strongly on the terminal type. emacs' latency is always a bit (0.1-0.3ms or so) lower than vim's. Apart from that, xterm was around 1.1ms, (u)rxvt around 17.5ms, and gnome-terminal around 26.2ms. I wonder where the delay in rxvt compared to xterm comes from.

Depending how you're measuring it, I believe it could be because urxvt's output is buffered by default whereas xterm's isn't. That may mean 16.7ms (= 1 second / 60Hz) is added to the measured latency, though the extra time would have no effect in practice. ed: or maybe thats excluded from the measurement but urxvt is double buffered by default?

You're right, urxvt refreshes at a maximum of 60Hz (line 1021 in http://cvs.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/src/command.C?view=markup). Above, I mistakenly measured only urxvt. Rxvt does a select() with a timeout of 5ms before redrawing (lines 1600 and 1664 in "src/command.c"). The total latency with rxvt is about 5.7ms.

Re: Typing with pleasure

#15

Post by melling » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 6:37 PM UTC

Anyone have thoughts on keyboard switch type?

http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboard_switch_mechanisms.html

Most keyboards (rubber dome, scissor) require the user to press a key to the bottom (i.e. A hard stop). Mechanical keyboards (e.g. spring, MX Cherry) register a keypress part way down. Cherry Blues, for example, have a pronounced sound and tactile feedback. Do these features make people better typist?

Re: Typing with pleasure

#16

Post by chubot » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 6:48 PM UTC

Great to see this quantified! My pet peeve is laggy interfaces. I'm not surprised to see Atom on there, because browsers do seem to have a big problem with this. Ubuntu seems to have a big problem with this too, e.g. in the native "gedit".

Back in the Ubuntu 4.0 days (2006 or so), the default terminal was really slow. I didn't really know how to use Linux then, so I would SSH into with Putty on Windows, and use the terminal/Vim that way. This was actually more responsive than a local terminal!

Does anyne else feel a sense of raw power when they switch to a native terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1) ... ?

Re: Typing with pleasure

#17

Post by geekone » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 7:08 PM UTC

rdancer wrote: post #8

And here I am, working over SSH -- every stroke requires a round-trip. Over a high-latency link, that's sometimes a few seconds between a batch of characters appear :-)

Give Mosh [1] a shot! From the site: "Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes."

Great for being on an intermittent and/or slow link.

[1] https://mosh.mit.edu/

Re: Typing with pleasure

#18

Post by Namrog84 » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 7:22 PM UTC

I would have loved to see a few more heavy ide such as visual studio and xcode and a few others. Though it was still quite great

Re: Typing with pleasure

#19

Post by smrq » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 7:28 PM UTC

Terrific data (okay, so it confirms a preexisting bias on my part). I would like to see the numbers for Visual Studio -- I've completely sworn it off at my day job in favor of Sublime Text + command-line MSBuild, for typing latency alone. I'm curious if my perception aligns with reality.

Re: Typing with pleasure

#20

Post by nickpsecurity » Fri, Dec 25, 2015, 7:35 PM UTC

geekone wrote: post #17

rdancer wrote: post #8

And here I am, working over SSH -- every stroke requires a round-trip. Over a high-latency link, that's sometimes a few seconds between a batch of characters appear :-)

Give Mosh [1] a shot! From the site: "Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes." Great for being on an intermittent and/or slow link. [1] https://mosh.mit.edu/

"and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes."

I've always pushed for this to be in the remote terminals by default as my prototypes took almost no effort to implement. With plenty of benefit, too, for anyone that values instant feedback! That was a throwaway, though. Thanks for the link to a real app doing it. :)