Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cenk | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, do you really notice an input delay? Is there a way of measuring this? Because I tried to compare Supernotes to BBEdit and couldn’t tell the difference

View on HN

I do, personally, but that might just be because I'm used to xedit, and have a monitor with a reasonably high refresh rate, a keyboard I purchased largely to lower input latency (which I find annoying), and a typing speed that's decent (120wpm).

You can measure input latency relatively easily, but it's not as useful without a frame of reference. Here are a couple internet posts on doing exactly that:

https://danluu.com/term-latency/

http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency...

If you're not wanting to go out of your way to measure it, though, there's a pretty straightforward way you can get a feel for it: Pay attention to when the glyph appears on the screen, versus when the click of the keypress happens. For example, in xedit, I press 't', and the appearance of the glyph occurs almost simultaneously with the click. The click and the appearance happen much more noticeably asynchronously with Electron applications, including this one.

Personally, I use a monitor with a 60hz refresh rate but can still tell the difference between VSCode (an Electron app) and Sublime Text for example. It's very subtle, and I overall I believe VSCode to be usable, but after enough time using a native text editor, Electron-based editors feel sluggish in comparison and it takes me a little while until I'm used to them again.

I actually used to be an avid Sublime Text coder, but at some point I switched to VSCode for other aspects of DX besides performance and my happiness with that changeover (compared to when I'd tried Atom in the past) is what convinced me that we could definitely build an Electron app that, although the perf would never be best-in-class, could definitely be good enough for 99.9% of users and use-cases.

We definitely haven't optimized quite as much as the VSCode team, but not being fully optimized means I can still improve perf for our users (myself included), which I'm always happy to do!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com