Top all-time · #680
Pavel Fatin
Personal blog · pavelfatin.comprogrammingdesign
Pavel Fatin's personal blog at pavelfatin.com covers programming and design. Since 2010, 94 different Hacker News readers have linked it 123 times, most often “Typing with pleasure”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its typing-latency benchmarks of text editors and IDEs, which commenters cite when comparing Atom, VS Code and IntelliJ.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- called a 'really nice article' and 'very well written and in-depth'; one says not reading it is a disservice
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Typing with pleasure57 people · 72 mentions · first linked 2015-12-24
- Scrolling with Pleasure (2017)12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2017-03-19
- Typometer: A tool to measure and analyze the visual latency of text editors6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-03-18
- /typing-with-pleasure/5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-07-15
- Typing with pleasure, and low latency3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-08-22
- /typing-with-pleasure/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-12-15
- /images/typing/editor-latency-windows-text.png2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-03-24
- Scrolling with Pleasure2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-06-05
- /typing-with-pleasure2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-03-31
What Hacker News says?
The same reason its annoying when any other kind of program is slow, especially interactive ones. I don't want to see freezes for 2-3 seconds for some GC run, I don't want the letters to appear several 100ms after I've typed, I don't want to wait minutes for it to parse a large-ish file or update the autocomplete suggestions. https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “Sublime Text 3.0”Submitted Typometer: A tool to measure and analyze the visual latency of text editors as a story · 162 points
HN discussionWhat was Atom good for, when compared with something like Visual Studio Code? I recall reading about typing latency and it seemed to come out as one of the slower options: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ I guess it would have occupied a similar place as Brackets, another vaguely similar project? https://brackets.io/ Then again, with how popular VSC has become and with how insanely many extensions there…
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “Sunsetting Atom”Submitted Typing with pleasure, and low latency as a story · 141 points
HN discussionSorry, the first link was meant to be: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised”Submitted Typing with pleasure as a story · 104 points
HN discussionhttps://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/#editor-benchmar... This finds JB editors to be good for typing latency, and mirrors my experience. I keep my number of plugins to a minimum, check if disabling your plugins improves the issue.
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised”Submitted Scala for Project Euler as a story · 37 points
HN discussionhttps://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/#editor-benchmar... Atom is the Electron-based editor from GitHub. It's way slower than the others. I can't think of any Electron apps that have low response latency. VScode's is noticeably much higher than, say, Emacs.
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “Psst: Fast Spotify client with native GUI, without Electron, built in Rust”Submitted Typing with pleasure as a story · 33 points
HN discussionIsn't this based on Atom (or at least similar design)? It really makes me sad that people are making editors with so many features and nice things, but ignoring the fundamentals like latency. https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ I'm eagerly awaiting a mac version of 4coder ( http://www.4coder.net/ ).
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “Visual Studio Code 1.0”Submitted Typing with Pleasure (2015) as a story · 23 points
HN discussionExpanding on this, there's a detailed analysis of the various contributors to editor latency (from keyboard electronics to scanout) by one of the jetbrains devs at[1]. They show average keypress-to-USB latency for a typical keyboard of 14ms! 1: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “Zed on Linux Is Here”Submitted Scrolling with Pleasure (2017) as a story · 20 points
HN discussionhttps://pavelfatin.com/images/typing/editor-latency-windows-...
Comment linking /images/typing/editor-latency-windows-text.png
on “VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering”Submitted Design Patterns in Scala as a story · 14 points
HN discussionThat's because, unequivocally, atom is slower. https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering”Submitted Scrolling with Pleasure as a story · 5 points
HN discussionDo any of the latency advantages of Xi carry over if you wrap it all up in Electron? The Electron editors do pretty badly on this front [1]. [1] https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]”Submitted Scrolling with pleasure as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYou might be interested in this article from a JetBrains developer who implemented zero-latency typing in IDEA: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video]”Submitted Scrolling with Pleasure as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI have absolutely no use for a code editor with a typing latency as high as vscode. Anyone who has not read https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ is doing himself a disservice.
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “VSCodium – Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS Code”Submitted Scrolling with pleasure as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Are you telling me that it was a delay when you type in vscode? If so, either your configuration or computer is doing something wrong This is simply not true. There is inherent latency in any rendering pipeline, and VSCode and Atom both have input latency that is significantly higher than other editors like Sublime Text owing to a bloated rendering pipeline. You can read more about this and how easy it is to intro…
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed”Submitted Typing with Pleasure as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIs it, though? IntelliJ, a fully-blown IDE gets below it: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ I don’t see the logic behind having a full 60fps in a 3d game but not in a textarea (even though the linked article explains why it’s difficult).
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “Text Editor: Data Structures”Submitted Scrolling with pleasure as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWell for instance, Atom and VSCode have ~50ms (or ~49x) more input latency than editors written in C (source: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ ) But maybe we are willing to accept 50x worse performance and higher memory requirements and slower startup time because the language is nice and guarantees correctness....Well no, it is javascript, not Haskell or Lisp. So, what is the win here? Why have we colle…
Comment linking /typing-with-pleasure/
on “HyperTerm – JS/HTML/CSS Terminal”Submitted Typing with Pleasure (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
