what is the best dispatcher to use for user input?

Doesn't matter

Typically, you’d want to handle UI events on the

Main

dispatcher, to ensure that the UI state is consistent with the data being processed. Depending on what you’re needing to do, you may need to receive the event on the

Main

dispatcher and then start a long-running task on a background dispatcher such as

IO

Certain things you need to do on the main thread as required by the OS, but other than that it's unlikely to matter

what dispatcher should I use if I'm both reading a file and parsing it?

I run everything in my UI on

Dispatchers.Main

and everything else on

Dispatchers.Default

. When using the default dispatcher, I use an ongoing Coroutine for thread safety. If there's blocking work, I use

Dispatchers. IO

for that work

But the parsing might take a lot of time too

For understanding thread pools, check out https://gist.githubusercontent.com/djspiewak/46b543800958cf61af6efa8e072bfd5c/raw/14afe80177692d93c97803ac5548139ac97bc063/thread-pools.md

It's not Android 😄

Oh gotcha. What platform?

Jvm desktop

Must be nice not to have to deal with config changes lol

basically what I have is the user gets an input popup, and while he types it parses some files

Read input on any dispatcher, probably Main, than dispatch heavy work to another dispatcher (Read/Write file on IO, some CPU bound processing on Default)