I have literally no idea why people care so much about typing latency. If you type that fast, I suggest that you seriously consider finding a more intellectually challenging task.
Typing speed (throughput) and latency are (somewhat) orthogonal.
Some people appear to be sensitive to throughput, some to jitter, some to absolute latency. I'd even argue that "fast" typists may be less sensitive to absolute latency as there's more of a streaming approach than with "slow" typists which is more event-based.
But it's also personal. Whatever my typing speed is, I want things to happen ~"right now".
I think latency on its own is not as much of an issue as fluctuations of it (jitter) when it comes to human perception. At least myself is very susceptible to jitter so I appreciate post author's work documenting those stats, though jitter is not addressed directly.
It's not like the typing latency is blocking. You can keep typing and issuing commands. The screen will catch up. I feel like anything under 50ms (20fps) is probably fine; the other various feedbacks like tree-sitter and LSP and what-not will probably be bigger bottlenecks anyhow. (Ed: whoa, uh, was surprised how slow these editors are, but that seems to be for full screen / little-whitespace redraws?).
As a vim user I can be going full steam ahead without looking at feedback. People used to come by and ask, how do you read that screen, everything is so small, and in jest I'd say I don't need to, I already have perceived everything there. My internal model of where I am and where I want to go and what I want to change is only semi-gated on seeing things. I'm not particularly great at navigating between things, but it still feels like a lot of this moving-between-things and changing-things-around stuff is pushed down to a semi-subconscious layer. The brain thinks and somehow the fingers do, and it doesn't feel like I'm really paying attention as these things happen.
One of my favorite pieces of anticipation and matching, that I haven't done in a decade, is Mass Effect 2, which had a pretty neat "hacking" mini-game that involved trying to recognize which of multiple windows of scrolling code was the "right" of code, from shape. Something about that really spoke to me as one of the finer arts of coding, of pattern recognition, of being able to discern place & identify patterns & location quickly from lo-fi moving screens. Being able to navigate code & yourself by look and feel is awesome. https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Bypass#Hacking
Terminals ought to be fast though. We should expect it. I respect that. Some of these terminals do seem unreasonably slow, and that should be improved. And maybe ghostty just rocks everyone & we all find we're way better after it, after terminals get way faster, but I also expect there's rapidly diminishing rapidly returns somewhere. But it'd be cool to set up on a 540 Hz monitor with a fast as sin emulator and find out if that's true or not.
If you need the visual check, that's probably a colossal amount of latency already. Even if the screen updates are instant, the act of reading & comprehending is - I believe - slow.
It does help to have fast response. Agreed. I use Debian's aptitude, and man, even on a beastly desktop there is a lot of waiting >1s+. On my ultra-portables it's even worse (really should go back to atomic system images via btrfs to avoid this). Latency sucks. But I feel like there's significantly outsided attention paid to whether a terminal is 10ms or 40ms. Once we start getting to 100ms, it's starting to be a real issue, is problematic. But I think generally most devs pretty quickly reach a point where as they type and do work, they use feel & their mental model way more than the screen to achieve their goals. The feedback, when it's fast, stops being visual.
