4 ms·

Why do people care so much about terminal emulators and their supposed "bloat" and "complexity"?

by smlacy 10y ago

charlesetc 10y ago
There have been many times when vim starts glitching out or something because of the terminal emulator I'm using. Even well tested ones like X-term and gnome-terminal. I never had that problem using st. We hack so much into a text interface it's really easy to accumulate bugs.
- jjawssd 10y ago
  Have you considered using neovim?
  - Gonzih 10y ago
    Currently neovim is not even close in stability to vim.
    - daenney 10y ago
      Based on what criteria and experiences? I've been running it for a year with a slew of plugins for example and haven't experienced a single hiccup.
      - Gonzih 10y ago
        Big part my plugins just do not work still in neovim.
        Lapsa 10y ago
        Try spartan way for vim too. Used to have huge list of plugins and exotic vim hacks in my `.vimrc`, nowadays ain't even using plugin manager. `:colorscheme blue` and off you go.
- smlacy 10y ago
  I use tmux+emacs inside gnome-terminal for 8+ hours a day. I rarely (never?) see any "terminal glitching" except for the cases where I've done something absurdly wrong, like running a bash inside emacs-shell with the wrong setting for TERM. Terminal emulation is essentially a solved problem (state machines and control code sets are small and well defined, there are many reference implementations and compatibility tests). If you see glitching, it's probably from what you're doing inside the terminal, not from the terminal itself.
chrissnell 10y ago
Bugs. When you work all day long in a terminal, you need it to be reliable. As I mentioned above, xfce4-terminal is what I normally use but select-to-copy doesn't work 100% of the time. This is super annoying. I'd switch to rxvt but it has its own problems. Despite having had terminals for so much longer, *nix has fallen behind macOS when it comes to terminal usability and reliability.
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  Termite is pretty good and bug-free in my experience.
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    Plug: I maintain a fork of termite which doesn't require Daniel's patched VTE3 fork; and guts most of the exotic vimmy features. I really like VTE's behaviour; even if the performance is a bit worse than XTerm (though worlds ahead of what I've seen on OSX with iTerm2 and Terminal.app). I rely on using iBus input methods in the terminal on a daily basis, and VTE handles this wonderfully. https://github.com/xorgy/termite https://github.com/xorgy/termite
    - omtose 10y ago
      I've also gutted a lot of stuff from termite in my own fork (overaly, vi mode, clickable urls) and it definitely makes for a lovely minimalistic terminal. I'm thankful for termite being so simple (granted the lifting is done by a lib) that this is possible without much effort. I just wish I could log the scrollback buffer so that I could open an actual editor on it, but I don't think libvte exposes anything to do this.
  - chrissnell 10y ago
    Hey, thanks for the tip on Termite. I've been using it since reading your comment and it's awesome. Cut and paste and URL opening both work flawlessly!
- smlacy 10y ago
Skunkleton 10y ago
Its funny, but I have had fewer stability issues with gnome-terminal than I have had with st. Seems like most people have the opposite experience.
shmerl 10y ago
I care about functionality. Stuff like true color support helps reduce strain to the eyes.
Pawka 10y ago
Performance.
Karrot_Kream 10y ago
Not everyone has the latest and greatest machine.
- smlacy 10y ago
  Are you saying that xterm has poor performance? This appears to be true (from other comments on terminal performance in this thread) but other VTE-based terminals (gnome-terminal) have high performance and work great on sub-1GHz class machines.
chriswarbo 10y ago
The way I see it, st is trying to replace xterm. xterm is a de facto standard, in that you can sit down in front of a machine which appears to be running some flavour of Unix, it doesn't matter if it's Gnome, KDE, TWM, CDE, etc., GNU or BSD or Solaris or whatever, you'll probably be able to find xterm and work out the rest from there. Many devs/hackers use xterm as their day-to-day terminal, and seem to approximate ANSI control code compliance with "works in xterm". The problem with this situation, as mentioned on the st page, is that xterm is unmaintained and unmaintainable. st is trying to be a maintainable replacement, making improvements like vector fonts, and not being shy about ignoring legacy/niche/solved-elsewhere features.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  xterm is actively maintained and cares about a whole pile of corner cases that were enough for users to raise valid bugs. See the changelog: http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html
- smlacy 10y ago
  - I dispute "many devs/hackers use xterm". I switched away from xterm over 20 years ago, when it was clear that they were never going to have good support for anti-aliased fonts. I work heavily in the linux and with linux devs, and I can't remember the last time I saw someone using an xterm on a modern system. - xterm is for exactly the case you describe: when all you have is "base X11" and you need a terminal. No crazy multi-gigabyte toolkit requirements. Its essentially a fallback/recovery tool for these cases, although I prefer just working on console when things get that bad. - xterm's codebase is 30+ years old. "unmaintainable" seems like an overstatement, by a longshot.

Why do people care so much about terminal emulators and their supposed "bloat" and "complexity"?

by smlacy 10y ago

Why do people care so much about terminal emulators and their supposed "bloat" and "complexity"?

There have been many times when vim starts glitching out or something because of the terminal emulator I'm using. Even well tested ones like X-term and gnome-terminal. I never had that problem using st. We hack so much into a text interface it's really easy to accumulate bugs.

jjawssd 10y ago
Have you considered using neovim?
- Gonzih 10y ago
  Currently neovim is not even close in stability to vim.
  - daenney 10y ago
    Based on what criteria and experiences? I've been running it for a year with a slew of plugins for example and haven't experienced a single hiccup.
    - Gonzih 10y ago
      Big part my plugins just do not work still in neovim.
      - Lapsa 10y ago
        Try spartan way for vim too. Used to have huge list of plugins and exotic vim hacks in my `.vimrc`, nowadays ain't even using plugin manager. `:colorscheme blue` and off you go.
smlacy 10y ago
I use tmux+emacs inside gnome-terminal for 8+ hours a day. I rarely (never?) see any "terminal glitching" except for the cases where I've done something absurdly wrong, like running a bash inside emacs-shell with the wrong setting for TERM. Terminal emulation is essentially a solved problem (state machines and control code sets are small and well defined, there are many reference implementations and compatibility tests). If you see glitching, it's probably from what you're doing inside the terminal, not from the terminal itself.

chrissnell 10y ago

Bugs. When you work all day long in a terminal, you need it to be reliable. As I mentioned above, xfce4-terminal is what I normally use but select-to-copy doesn't work 100% of the time. This is super annoying. I'd switch to rxvt but it has its own problems. Despite having had terminals for so much longer, *nix has fallen behind macOS when it comes to terminal usability and reliability.

Ar-Curunir 10y ago
Termite is pretty good and bug-free in my experience.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  Plug: I maintain a fork of termite which doesn't require Daniel's patched VTE3 fork; and guts most of the exotic vimmy features. I really like VTE's behaviour; even if the performance is a bit worse than XTerm (though worlds ahead of what I've seen on OSX with iTerm2 and Terminal.app). I rely on using iBus input methods in the terminal on a daily basis, and VTE handles this wonderfully. https://github.com/xorgy/termite https://github.com/xorgy/termite
  - omtose 10y ago
    I've also gutted a lot of stuff from termite in my own fork (overaly, vi mode, clickable urls) and it definitely makes for a lovely minimalistic terminal. I'm thankful for termite being so simple (granted the lifting is done by a lib) that this is possible without much effort. I just wish I could log the scrollback buffer so that I could open an actual editor on it, but I don't think libvte exposes anything to do this.
- chrissnell 10y ago
  Hey, thanks for the tip on Termite. I've been using it since reading your comment and it's awesome. Cut and paste and URL opening both work flawlessly!
smlacy 10y ago

Skunkleton 10y ago

Its funny, but I have had fewer stability issues with gnome-terminal than I have had with st. Seems like most people have the opposite experience.

shmerl 10y ago

I care about functionality. Stuff like true color support helps reduce strain to the eyes.

Pawka 10y ago

Performance.

Karrot_Kream 10y ago

Not everyone has the latest and greatest machine.

smlacy 10y ago
Are you saying that xterm has poor performance? This appears to be true (from other comments on terminal performance in this thread) but other VTE-based terminals (gnome-terminal) have high performance and work great on sub-1GHz class machines.

chriswarbo 10y ago

The way I see it, st is trying to replace xterm. xterm is a de facto standard, in that you can sit down in front of a machine which appears to be running some flavour of Unix, it doesn't matter if it's Gnome, KDE, TWM, CDE, etc., GNU or BSD or Solaris or whatever, you'll probably be able to find xterm and work out the rest from there. Many devs/hackers use xterm as their day-to-day terminal, and seem to approximate ANSI control code compliance with "works in xterm". The problem with this situation, as mentioned on the st page, is that xterm is unmaintained and unmaintainable. st is trying to be a maintainable replacement, making improvements like vector fonts, and not being shy about ignoring legacy/niche/solved-elsewhere features.

davidgerard 10y ago
xterm is actively maintained and cares about a whole pile of corner cases that were enough for users to raise valid bugs. See the changelog: http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html
smlacy 10y ago
- I dispute "many devs/hackers use xterm". I switched away from xterm over 20 years ago, when it was clear that they were never going to have good support for anti-aliased fonts. I work heavily in the linux and with linux devs, and I can't remember the last time I saw someone using an xterm on a modern system. - xterm is for exactly the case you describe: when all you have is "base X11" and you need a terminal. No crazy multi-gigabyte toolkit requirements. Its essentially a fallback/recovery tool for these cases, although I prefer just working on console when things get that bad. - xterm's codebase is 30+ years old. "unmaintainable" seems like an overstatement, by a longshot.