6 ms·

Alacritty makes claims about throughput, which is different than latency, and then uses the word "fast" which can be confused to mean either or both. Alacritty'

Alacritty makes claims about throughput, which is different than latency, and then uses the word "fast" which can be confused to mean either or both. Alacritty's benchmarks are based on how much text it can process being output to the terminal per second, which it is much better at than most terminals. However separately I think it might be true that kitty also has better throughput, while having better latency and many more features, this is just based on talking to a friend though I haven't tested this.

chmln 6y ago
Sadly, alacritty feels like such a waste of effort. The input lag is pretty bad, and text processing performance is a non-issue with most terminals. I've used xterm for years and never felt it was too slow at that. Latency makes much more difference in how fast a terminal feels. This is where kitty does a fantastic job, even letting me trade some CPU cycles for really low latency with its options. I can strongly recommend it to anyone who values low latency.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  alacritty still has the best font handling/rendering from my comparisons, though kitty's latency is very noticeably better
  - aslpavel 6y ago
    alacritty is actually pretty bad at font rendering quality, at least on macos, it looks worst in comparison to all terminal i've tried https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/486 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/486
    - ubercow13 6y ago
      Oh interesting. On Linux it's clearly better than kitty: https://i.imgur.com/fzAPhlN.png https://i.imgur.com/fzAPhlN.png Last time I checked it also had the best unicode handling too, in terms of reliably falling back to some other font for missing codepoints and getting the display of oversized characters right.
      - chaorace 6y ago
        It's not immediately obvious which terminal is which. I feel like the text is sharper and, as a result, more readable in the right window, not sure if that agrees or disagrees with your thoughts
        ubercow13 6y ago
        The right one is kitty. Look how the italic characters have uneven spacing, eg. the 'l' in 'bold', and some of them are chopped off, for example 'M'. Look how the percent sign on the bottom looks like it's been stretched and the circles aren't the same. The right hand one is sharper but I have my freetype tuned to look like the left one, which looks the same as every other application on my PC. kitty is doing something completely different and incorrect.
- riquito 6y ago
  I love it, I use it daily on Fedora and MacOS and is the easiest to configure and fastest terminal I've used so far (previously my main terminal was urxvt in daemon mode, a feature I still hope to see in Alacritty). Christian Duerr and friends are doing a great job, please continue to work on it.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  What are the low-latency configuration options you mention? EDIT: Actually, I use a Bluetooth keyboard, so it's probably moot.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    'repaint_delay' and 'input_delay' - there are explanations of each in the default config file
KarlKemp 6y ago
Throughput used to be a problem (looking at you, Hype), but the differences have become smaller as everyone upped the9r game. This is obviously subjective to some degree. But I used to frequently get annoyed at various terminals until two or so years ago, and have just forgotten about the issue since.

chmln 6y ago

Sadly, alacritty feels like such a waste of effort. The input lag is pretty bad, and text processing performance is a non-issue with most terminals. I've used xterm for years and never felt it was too slow at that. Latency makes much more difference in how fast a terminal feels. This is where kitty does a fantastic job, even letting me trade some CPU cycles for really low latency with its options. I can strongly recommend it to anyone who values low latency.

ubercow13 6y ago
alacritty still has the best font handling/rendering from my comparisons, though kitty's latency is very noticeably better
- aslpavel 6y ago
  alacritty is actually pretty bad at font rendering quality, at least on macos, it looks worst in comparison to all terminal i've tried https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/486 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/486
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    Oh interesting. On Linux it's clearly better than kitty: https://i.imgur.com/fzAPhlN.png https://i.imgur.com/fzAPhlN.png Last time I checked it also had the best unicode handling too, in terms of reliably falling back to some other font for missing codepoints and getting the display of oversized characters right.
    - chaorace 6y ago
      It's not immediately obvious which terminal is which. I feel like the text is sharper and, as a result, more readable in the right window, not sure if that agrees or disagrees with your thoughts
      - ubercow13 6y ago
        The right one is kitty. Look how the italic characters have uneven spacing, eg. the 'l' in 'bold', and some of them are chopped off, for example 'M'. Look how the percent sign on the bottom looks like it's been stretched and the circles aren't the same. The right hand one is sharper but I have my freetype tuned to look like the left one, which looks the same as every other application on my PC. kitty is doing something completely different and incorrect.
riquito 6y ago
I love it, I use it daily on Fedora and MacOS and is the easiest to configure and fastest terminal I've used so far (previously my main terminal was urxvt in daemon mode, a feature I still hope to see in Alacritty). Christian Duerr and friends are doing a great job, please continue to work on it.
StavrosK 6y ago
What are the low-latency configuration options you mention? EDIT: Actually, I use a Bluetooth keyboard, so it's probably moot.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  'repaint_delay' and 'input_delay' - there are explanations of each in the default config file

KarlKemp 6y ago

Throughput used to be a problem (looking at you, Hype), but the differences have become smaller as everyone upped the9r game. This is obviously subjective to some degree. But I used to frequently get annoyed at various terminals until two or so years ago, and have just forgotten about the issue since.