Comment by nomel

5 years ago

The newest Apple Pencil is apparently around 9ms [1]. It really does fool your brain into thinking something is coming out of the tip.

[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/3402336/apple-pencil-change...

17 comments

nomel

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sneak  5 years ago

If only they cared about such things for Terminal.app, so we didn't have the extra step of installing Alacritty on every single machine to improve the situation (and not to anywhere near 9ms, even).

  • matthewmacleod  5 years ago

    Isn't Terminal.app famously pretty speedy compared with most other terminal emulators? In fact, there's a link from this article to another of Dan's posts that's precisely about terminal performance - https://danluu.com/term-latency/

    It's a few years old now so I've no doubt that Alacritty's performance has improved, but I'm suspicious of the idea that Terminal.app is noticeably slow.

    • jd3  5 years ago

      I've always loved the low latency of Terminal.app (particularly over iTerm2, which I find unusable), but recently noticed that it has gotten a little worse in Big Sur now that the "Antialias Text" option is broken on non-retina displays.

      I assume the extra forced compositing/rendering/whatever being imposed by antialiasing is to blame, though I could be wrong.

      Catalina: https://i.imgur.com/G66HpJ6.png

      Big Sur: https://i.imgur.com/R5dlzdj.png

      rdar://FB8901170 if any apple employees happen to see this :)

  • sushisource  5 years ago

    I've always found this a bit funny - why are people so concerned with input latency at the terminal? (I get why I care with a phone, or gaming). It's not like anyone's typing hundreds of characters a second. I use Alacritty, but mostly because I like the way it's config file works and it does nice font rendering. The latency thing barely even registers.

    • sneak  5 years ago

      The same reason people are concerned with input latency when scrolling on a touchscreen. Lag is annoying, and the less you have, the more satisfying it is to use the device. Latency is detectible on even a single character, "hundreds of characters per second" has nothing to do with it.

      It's the same reason I'm not a big fan of mushy keyboards, or having to ssh between continents.

      7 replies →

    • Der_Einzige  5 years ago

      Some of us love CLI programs or using ncurses. Rougelike video games which can be played in a terminal (nethack) would profit heavily from a fast terminal

  • p1necone  5 years ago

    URxvt on a 144hz gaming monitor is excellent.

    • tutfbhuf  5 years ago

      URxvt is fast, but still has a mean input latency of 18.3 ms. Try Xterm it only adds 1.7 ms to the stack. I find the difference very noticeable. I switched from URxvt to Xterm a few years back, although I had to give up on proper UTF-8 glyph rendering.

      Low latency is important for me, because I use Vim inside Tmux inside Xterm inside Xorg and latencies add up.

      https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/

  • coldtea  5 years ago

    Huh? Terminal.app is one of the fastest ones. iTerm2 is much slower in comparison.

  • jancsika  5 years ago

    At least for me, the terminal is the only place where latency is tolerable on underpowered, crappy machines. This is because my keyboard input stream will always trigger behavior deterministically in the terminal.