Terminal and shell performance
I think one thing that this really points out is just how much care Apple has poured into Terminal.app. It&#x27;s <i>very</i> good, and every time I have to use another terminal application (ugh conhost.exe) I am reminded of this. It&#x27;s got a bunch of really thoughtful little features (showing what processes are attached to the current pty, option-clicking to move the cursor rapidly, full mouse support for apps like vim, good linewrap detection, and recently support for rich-text copy&#x2F;paste which is useful for showing coloured terminal output, etc. etc.), and it remains really fast and snappy despite these features.<p>On a related note, I am big into latency analysis and driving down latency in interactive systems. I&#x27;m quite familiar with the touchscreen work cited at the top, and having played with the system I can attest that &lt;1ms latency feels actually magical. At that level, it really doesn&#x27;t feel like any touchscreen you&#x27;ve ever used - it genuinely feels like a physical object you&#x27;re dragging around (the first demo of the system only let you drag a little rectangle around a projected screen). It&#x27;s amazing what they had to do to get the latency down - a custom DLP projector with hacked firmware that could only display a little square at a specified position at thousands of FPS, a custom touchscreen controller, and a direct line between the two. No OS, no windowing system, nada. After seeing that demo, I can&#x27;t help but believe that latency is the one thing that will make or break virtual reality - the one thing that separates &quot;virtual&quot; from &quot;reality&quot;. I want to build a demo someday that does the latency trick in VR - a custom rig that displays ultra-simple geometry that has sub-millisecond latency to human head movement. I will bet that even simple geometry will feel more realistic than the most complex scene at 90 FPS.