The idea came from doing it manually, fiddling with timers or calculating time passed was a pain, so I wouldn't actually use the technique often, but when I did, it was very helpful.

One of the hardest parts for me has been dealing with parsing the text to extract the data from it, and to do syntax highlighting. It's not that hard to do in a naive way, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out more robust ways of doing it. I'm still feeling stuck in that area, send help!