this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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~~They notice 50 ms vs. 200 ms? Back then in Windows 7, there was a registry hack to chabnge the autohide animation duration of the taskbar. 400 ms was default, 300 ms fast and 200 ms was snappy. This was a lession to me, that interaction/interface stuff plays in the 100 ms at most.~~
Edit: guess it's different in input vs. animation.
50 ms is clearly noticeable. Dan Luu mentions 2ms in the original post.
Try in a terminal
and vary the number.
Actually, the time resolution for visual sensations is at least 5ms and for sound it is even smaller - a drummer in s band needs to practice a lot to get the right beat.
Terminal echo is not a good measure, far too slow. Make it a C program.
You can definitely feel 100 ms in input response time. That's about what an analog modem's latency would be. I can tell you, that's very much noticeable on a telnet or ssh connection when you're typing (though to be fair, what matters there is really round-trip time, so one should probably double that).
On that note, if someone hasn't run into it, mosh uses UDP and adaptive local echo to shave down network latency for terminal connections, and might be worth looking into if you often do remote work in a terminal over a WAN. It uses ssh to bootstrap auth (if you're concerned about using less-widely-used thing what does network authentication, which I remember I was). I find that it makes things more pleasant, and also like some of its other features, like auto-reconnecting after an arbitrary length of time. One can just close a laptop and then reopen it a week later and the terminals function. Tmux and GNU screen can also do something similar
and in fact, I think that mosh and tmux are good packages to pair with each other
but they don't do quite the same thing, as they require (a) manual re-establishment of connection and are (b) aimed at letting one reconnect from different clients. It also displays a notice in the terminal if there's temporary network unavailability until it's re-established communication, so the user isn't simply staring at his screen wondering whether the software on the remote machine is being unresponsive or whether it's a network issue.