Honestly I don't think that the problem with VSCode is speed, even. It's bloat. It uses gobs of RAM just to open up a few text files. I compared it to Sublime Text a while back and it was something like 500 MB (for Sublime) to 1-1.5 GB (VSCode). That's not acceptable in my view.

A typical 60 Hz screen refresh is 16.7 ms

If you haven't tried a 144hz or even a 240hz gaming PC, you should. You can really feel the difference dragging things around the screen.

(I'm not sure I would notice typing, but for dragging windows around I could never go back to 60fps.)

I can certainly tell difference between 60 and 120 Hz in fast paced games, but I would not notice it in UI.

I thought so too, but for a while I had 2 144Hz monitors on my Mac Pro[1] and very much noticed it in the UI, window dragging was smoother, browser scrolling too, absolutely noticeable.

[1] Then Apple released the Pro Display and Big Sur and people wondered "how does the math work for a 6K display and bandwidth?" The answer, they completely fucking broke DP 1.4. Hundreds of complaints, different monitors, different GPUs, all broke by Big Sur to this day just so Apple could make their 6K display work.

My screens could do 4K HDR10 @ 144 Hz. After Big Sur? SDR @ 95 Hz, HDR @ 60Hz. Ironically I got better results telling my monitors to only advertise DP 1.2 support, then it was SDR@120, HDR@95Hz.

Studiously ignored by Apple because they broke the standard to eke out more bandwidth.

You can notice higher frame rates if you're in a competitive FPS, not a code editor. Unless you are playing CS2 in Emacs.

Properly levereged GUI editors have the potential to use the extra refresh rate for smother animations/smooth scrolling, though that's pretty far away from Emacs territory.

Choppy scrolling adds to the feeling of walking through swamp.

I do not notice any difference between my 120Hz work MacBook Pro and my 60Hz home MacBook Air. I might notice if I did a side-by-side comparison and looked closely. But why would I?

60hz gives me a headache after a few hours, been like that since I was a kid.

I agree with you -- but aiming for 1ms performance is pretty hard. That is 1/1000th of a second. Your keyboard probably has higher latency than that. Physics cannot be defeated in this regard.

Expanding 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/

There are keyboards with 1kHz polling.

Yes but it takes longer than that for the signal to reach the usb port. And i doubt if many of us are typing at 1000 keystrokes/second. Apparently that's around 12,000 words/minute assuming average word length of 5 characters.

1ms latency is about what can be achieved with USB.

I grew up a damn good HPB Q1 player at 250ish ms.

If you type and wait for the letter, I could see that being annoying. My brain works more in waves, my hands type a block and it's there on the screen. I've never once thought of character latency, but maybe that's my HPB roots.

I just want to point out that most keyboards hav a latency at 10-20 ms[1], so 1 ms is impossible.

[1]https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

That includes the physical travel time, which is an extremely important caveat.

Sure. But that is what the experience is, right? When I press a key, the entire end to end latency is what I care about.

Is there a physical reason for it? Or is it just that keyboard manufacturers don't care about latency?