> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update a tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms.

Modern text editors have to deal with proportional font, right to left writing, anti-aliasing, and a big bag of Unicode related issues (Arabic is going to break all assumptions you have on language and text editing)

Fantastic read on this subject from few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384158

(2019)

Previous discussions:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21105625 (29 September 2019, 542 points, 169 comments)

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 (14 February 2022, 399 points, 153 comments)

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If you find this article interesting, you’ll probably also like the article someone else published a month later: “Text Editing Hates You Too” <https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/>. It has also been discussed here a couple of times:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384158 (29 October 2019, 875 points, 282 comments)

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236874 (21 May 2021, 384 points, 182 comments)