Typing with pleasure • Hacker News Board

Re: Typing with pleasure

#31

Post by simik » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 2:23 AM 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 :-)

I found that in such cases it's actually more productive to close my eyes while typing.

Re: Typing with pleasure

#32

Post by Terretta » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 1:37 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…

Not sure that's right. The threshold I've seen feels closer to 30ms, as in, needs to be under that even for casual users.

Note that even at 100 ms, most of the editors in the final graph are disqualified.

Re: Typing with pleasure

#33

Post by barrkel » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 4:11 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 :-)

Emacs TRAMP is excellent for editing files over SSH. Even if you have to have a separate terminal for doing things like restarting services, doing the editing locally and updating via TRAMP is a big win.

Re: Typing with pleasure

#34

Post by barrkel » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 4:43 PM UTC

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.

One of the bigger problems with emacs is its font highlighting mechanism - typically it's implemented with regular expressions adding stacked attributes to text. Lexical highlighting using a state machine, with state recorded at line start would be much much faster - like, multiple 1000x faster. Emacs pays for its flexibility with massive performance loss.

Compare something like joe editor (the jmacs named executable has emacs-like key bindings) for syntax highlighting; it's night and day. Joe uses state machines (DFA) in a text description format for syntax highlighting. That means that strictly it can only do lexical highlighting, but that's much much better than nothing - and fully correct syntax highlighting requires a deeper analysis than is normally done in emacs modes.

Joe itself would be much faster again if the state machine was compiled to machine code.

Re: Typing with pleasure

#35

Post by vegabook » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

netmask wrote: post #7

gabesullice wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use terminal based Vim exclusively and now I'm completely spoiled. Every other interface seems ridiculously "laggy". I don't know if it's just a psychological thing or something more like the SpeechJammer, but if I type at a co-workers computer I will sometimes completely lock up and be unable to type for a second or two.

I really don't think that is a psychological thing, i ben using emacs in the terminal for years and only within Apples default Terminal application because iTerm is really laggy on linux i prefer terminology that is really really fast

+1 for terminology. Fast even on the cubieboard that I (also) run it under, and somehow, in my opinion, it does font spacing really well even under Ubuntu. Better than the standard terminal in both Unity and (especially) Gnome where kerning can be weird even on mono font.