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I am noticing that using manual "flip" tends to lag a lot more than just scrubbing the cursor in the timeline.

I am wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that Flip uses the hover tracking of the cursor while scrubbing, obviously, you click down and drag the timeline indicator cursor (pen touches the surface).

Would manual flip be faster if it required (or had an option to require) that the pen touches the screen while you hold down the activation key?

I'm on a Samsung Notebook 9 Pro (S pen with Wacom digitizer) - I understand this might be less of an issue on a traditional wacom tablet.

Not something that I would expect to be addressed quickly but I would like to make this known for future development (for an increasingly diverse ecosystem of drawing surfaces)

Maybe the pixel distance setting is too big? In the Flips window, try playing around with the pixel distance to find one small enough for your typical hand movements.

That's not it
After some playing around I think it might simply be because when you scrub in the timeline, TVPaint is allowed to skip frames in order to keep up.
Flip is oriented more for really looking at your animation so it seems that it does not skip frames.
I may have jumped the gun in calling it "slower" - since it also "does more"

Working on a pen tablet pc though, I like to keep my timeline collapsed whenever possible - and I use flips in order to navigate the timeline as much as I use it for checking animation. It could be interesting if there was a "scrub" mode within the flips (skips frames to keep up with pen movement - if you want to see all your frames - move slower just like scrubbing).

(somebody will probably suggest I work with the windowed timeline controls showing so that I can still scrub while the timeline is collapsed - which is reasonable... but not awesome. Imagine flips that are as snappy as scrubbing!)