At my new workplace, all development has to be done in an AWS Workspace with ~200ms network latency. I fear this is going to become more common especially for contractors.
Now keystrokes need to be accurate otherwise the lag makes corrections frustrating.
Earlier I would have happily hold down (C-p) till I move five lines up. With this lag it results in overshooting, then an attempt to correct it results in overshooting in the opposite direction. You just can't hold down keys anymore.
Now I do (C-5 p) or (C-u p followed by a single C-p) to move exactly five lines up. Things like avy to jump to the exact character become invaluable.
@RL_Dane it's annoying for sure, but I did get used to it. I don't think it's a 200 ms latency for text to appear for every keystroke, perhaps it is less than 50 ms even.
I'm sure they are doing some neat tricks to optimize it or give it the illusion of responsiveness.
What is more frustrating is the jitter. Sometimes it takes much longer etc.
I was unemployed for four months before this, so I am grateful for what I have. 😅
Terminals were in Amsterdam, and the mainframe in Minneapolis. Every key pressed would get processed by the mainframe before something would happen on the screen.
You get used to 500ms+ delays pretty quickly, since PLATO had this nice feature of aborting intermediate output between screen erases. So if you knew what you were doing, you could press keys ahead and still get what you want.
One Monday, we got switched to the new mainframe in Brussels. And that was WEIRD!
Because all of a sudden, letters would appear on the screen before you typed them. But they were always correct! WTF?
Only then I realised that any key pressed, would be sent to the mainframe about half way down. And the response would be shown before the key was all the way down, giving the impression of the system be prescient.
Took only a few hours to get used to 50 msecs turnaround. 🙂
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