Casey Muratori
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2016–2023
0:23 · 11K views · Aug 12, 2014
Casey Muratori captures CygnusEd Professional running on an Amiga 2000, showing how smoothly it scrolled text. He notes the real effect is better on a period CRT.
It is cited as evidence that text scrolling on late-80s hardware was smoother than in many modern editors.
4 comments from Hacker News
" ... like CygnusEd with its hand written assembler scrolling that remains, 30 years later, my benchmark for "fast and smooth enough" editor scrolling. Essentially nothing has yet matched it ..." Here it is: this video For those who never used CED on an Amiga, this is how it ran on now 30 years old hardware clocked at 8 MHz.
This brought memories! There's a video on Youtube showing CED in action... Ladies and gentlemen, this is how a graphical text editor scrolled text 30 years ago on a 8 MHz 16 bit machine! this video
They are not plenty fast. You know you don't have a fast platform when the best you can do is scroll + a couple animations at the same time. And even then, HTML+JS apps often cannot do that without lag. Not saying that native apps are necessarily better (especially on Android), I die a little inside each time I unlock my phone and the unlock screen fails to keep up with my finger. We had smooth scrolling in the late eighties on the Amiga 2000 (7 Mhz and 1MB of RAM) with CygnusEd: this video The fact that we barely manage to do that with HTML+JS on what amounts to supercomputers (relative to the time) should not make anyone proud.
As soon as computers were fast enough, people started to experiment with this stuff: this video How useful it is, is debatable, since it inherently adds lag to user input.