Ask HN: Impressively Responsive Modern Software?

3 points by cdev_gl 5 years ago | 5 comments

Even though modern computers are thousands of times faster, many modern user applications respond to user input fairly slowly. Just typing text into Word or OpenOffice can feel sluggish, Photoshop lags out processing input, many applications run on embedded web engines, etc. Often this results in tens or even hundreds of milliseconds of delay before responding to user input.

There's reasons for this. Modern software is doing a lot more, and we now have plenty of resources to waste...

I'd like to learn from the stand-outs in the field right now, so I'm wondering, in your anecdotal opinion, what are some pieces of software that exemplify "responsiveness" -- quickly loading, editing, saving, or otherwise reacting to users?

omg_ponies 5 years ago |

IDK what you're doing to your computers, but I frequently have multiple enormous Word documents open, 50+ tabs open in Firefox, with various sundry apps running in the background.

Throughout all that, almost always the perceived delay between me hitting a key on the keyboard, and having it appear in Word, is zero milliseconds.

For text, Notepad++ has always been pretty snappy on all the points you mentioned.

giantg2 5 years ago | |

I agree here if we are talking about personal computers. Work computers can be sluggish depending on how much monitoring software is used or how poorly it is configured.

tlack 5 years ago |

Does it have to be GUI software?

If not, Q/Kdb[1] redefined my notion of "economy" in the sense of resource usage. The whole environment with about 60% of what you'd expect is like 500kb?

It's also very very fast, processing millions of records a second. It changes the way you iterate on things when you can get results back instantly.

This is one of the few software packages I've used in the last couple years that stunned me with speed. Most people are too lazy to care.

Q/Kdb is far from perfect, but you didn't ask for perfect. :)

[1] https://kx.com/

O_H_E 5 years ago |

Sublime text.

w4tson 5 years ago | |

Yes! You can keep your Atoms and VS codes. Sublime is sooo fast. It never lets me down for opening huge files.