For avoidance of any doubt, I care deeply about my editor latency and agree that those terminals who claim to be "fast" and yet only care about average--not even common--throughout instead of latency misunderstand the problem space... and yet, I still can't say that it is reasonable to lose "confidence in your inputs" if a system is merely slow to process without losing any of your events. If an editor drops any of my inputs at all ever I 100% lose all confidence in what I'm doing; but if it always works then I can close my eyes and still use it without issue!
Terminal emulators with GPU-accelerated rendering became popular, but I often found the latency to be quite bad. (I eventually settled on Kitty and foot.)
With VS Code in particular, it’s just not designed to be operated via keyboard. With enough effort, you can map/script everything, but many actions translate to opening a pane and then focusing it. It’s an implicit modality switch that often ignores input during the transition. Also, opening a new terminal is oddly slow, I think due to VS Code injecting things into zsh init.
With tmux+nvim, it’s much more predictable. For example, if I think “I want to copy three lines out of this file and paste it into a new shell”, it’s just: `3yy alt+enter ctrl+shift+v`, and I know it’s going to work every time. Not to mention the composability of keybinds in different scenarios.
(Also, hi saurik! Cydia on my OG iPod Touch is a big part of what got me into coding in the first place :)
Unfortunately, for this use-case, neither Zed or Laplace will likely to fill the gap, as they rely only on LSP as Neovim. That's also my issue with both: They should focus more on providing features to support coding, not just speed.
Despite all my tweaking, VSCode sometimes just feels like it’s a beat behind, and keyboard commands get dropped in the transition between panes and such. Even just scrolling with nvim keybinds feels a bit off. My key repeat rate is fairly high, and I’ll hold down ^D to skim through a source file. VSCode’s renderer struggles to keep up smoothly sometimes.
This is all nitpicky stuff, not enough for me to swear off VSCode or anything. But it’s just annoying enough that every once in a while I end up in some rabbit hole of VSCode internals and css tweaks, instead of doing actual work. Most coding does not require a ton of bouncing around, but it does feel very liberating to have confidence in my inputs as I navigate around.