8 ms·

On my machine, when I last tried the various accelerated terminal emulators, I wasn't convinced. At least under plain X, GL context creation adds extra latency

On my machine, when I last tried the various accelerated terminal emulators, I wasn't convinced. At least under plain X, GL context creation adds extra latency when creating new windows (might be different if you use a compositor all the time I guess). In addition, on terminals such as kitty, the startup time of a full new process was really non-negligible I suspect due to the python support. With a tiling window manager, the built-in notebook/tiling functionality is not really useful (the window manager is more flexible and has universal keybindings) so when looking at the time required to pop a full new window in either single or shared instance they were actually behind regular xterm. Resource usage wasn't stellar either (xterm was still better than most lightweight libvt-based terminals). Couldn't feel much of a latency improvement (again, X without compositor). I'm sure at full throughput the difference is there, but who is looking at pages of output you can't read? I do keep terminals open for days, but my most common usage case is mostly open window -> run a small session -> close and I got annoyed fast.

zadjii 4y ago
In my experience, there's two archetypes of terminal users: * Open one window and leave it open forever. Reuse that one for all commands. * Open a window, run a couple commands, and close it. For the second group, startup perf is everything, because users hit that multiple times a day. For the first group, not so much. Some of the other tiling functionality is also more helpful for folks that aren't on platforms with as powerful of window managers (macOS, Windows)
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  I am in the second group, kinda - i hit Win+Shift+X (my global key for opening a new terminal) pretty much all the time to enter a few commands. I basically open terminals in a "train of thought"-like fashion, when i think of something that isn't about what i do in one terminal i open another to run/check/etc out. Sometimes i even close those terminals too :-P (when i work on something there might be several terminal windows scattered all over the place in different virtual desktops). Also i'm using xterm and i always found it very fast, i never thought that i'd like a faster terminal.
- minusf 4y ago
  i think a very effective workflow is missing from this list: open a long running terminal window but have many tmux panes. many modern wm's and terminals have multitab and multiwindow features but i invested time only into learning tmux and i can use it anywhere. and of course nohup functionality is builtin by definition. i have said it before and i can say it again: terminals come and go, tmux stays.
killerstorm 4y ago
A GPU-accelerated terminal emulator sounds like a nuclear-powered kitchen mixer to me. Like, why? Over 20 years of using terminal emulators not even single time I was like "Man, I wish my terminal was faster". Is this just a fun project to do, like, "yay, I wrote a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator!"?
- naikrovek 4y ago
  because rendering on the CPU is CPU-intensive when there's a lot of stuff scrolling by. even on an integrated GPU, text rendering is far faster when you use the GPU to render glyphs to a texture then display the texture instead of just displaying the glyphs individually with the CPU.
  - chupasaurus 4y ago
    Then what about the existence of Konsole?
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      it's existence is irrelevant. how does it perform? this conversation is about performance.
      - chupasaurus 4y ago
        Better in latency and throughput without GPU-accelerated rendering while being feature-rich, that's the point.
        naikrovek 4y ago
        forgive me if i don't take your word for it. I remember K-everything being slow as molasses and have avoided K-anything since.
        v3ss0n 4y ago
pablo1 4y ago
I agree with you, but stuck with wezterm for some time now for it's non-GPU related features. Specifically the font configuration with fallbacks and configurable font features such as ligatures and glyph variations is nice. I use a tiling window manager and a terminal multiplexer, so I have no use for terminal tabs/splits/panes. I wish there was something as "simple" as alacritty, but with nicer font rendering.
- Shorel 4y ago
  Kitty (the Linux one) has ligatures support, and it is GPU accelerated.
supernikio2 4y ago
I love wezterm due to its ligature and colourscheme support, and the fact it's very clean and simple compared to, say, Konsole (I also generally use i3 leading to KDE apps not being the prettiest).
an-unknown 4y ago
> xterm was still better than most lightweight libvt-based terminals Even worse: although many terminal emulators claim to emulate some "ANSI" terminal or be "VT100 compatible" and so on, most of them aren't at all. Simply run vttest in your terminal of choice and be surprised, especially by how many of them fail at very basic cursor movement tests. One of the few terminal emulators which gets most things right is xterm. It's also one of the very few terminal emulators which even supports exotic graphics capabilities like Sixel/ReGIS/Tek4014. Nobody should underestimate xterm …
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Xterm is like that sleeper car. Looks basic but beats everyone if it comes down to it.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  The author of Zutty has a pretty comprehensive writeup around that: https://tomscii.sig7.se/2020/12/A-totally-biased-comparison-of-Zutty https://tomscii.sig7.se/2020/12/A-totally-biased-comparison-...
incrudible 4y ago
> I'm sure at full throughput the difference is there I am not. It makes next to no sense to me. Maybe if you have a highres screen and dedicated VRAM. Otherwise going through the GPU interfacing ceremony just adds overhead.
vidarh 4y ago
Yeah, as I keep saying in these threads, the performance needed to do "fast enough" terminals was reached no later than the 1980s, and while bits per pixel and resolution has increased since then, it has increased slower than CPU speed. It's not the CPU cost of getting pixels on the screen that bottleneck most terminals.

zadjii 4y ago

In my experience, there's two archetypes of terminal users: * Open one window and leave it open forever. Reuse that one for all commands. * Open a window, run a couple commands, and close it. For the second group, startup perf is everything, because users hit that multiple times a day. For the first group, not so much. Some of the other tiling functionality is also more helpful for folks that aren't on platforms with as powerful of window managers (macOS, Windows)

badsectoracula 4y ago
I am in the second group, kinda - i hit Win+Shift+X (my global key for opening a new terminal) pretty much all the time to enter a few commands. I basically open terminals in a "train of thought"-like fashion, when i think of something that isn't about what i do in one terminal i open another to run/check/etc out. Sometimes i even close those terminals too :-P (when i work on something there might be several terminal windows scattered all over the place in different virtual desktops). Also i'm using xterm and i always found it very fast, i never thought that i'd like a faster terminal.
minusf 4y ago
i think a very effective workflow is missing from this list: open a long running terminal window but have many tmux panes. many modern wm's and terminals have multitab and multiwindow features but i invested time only into learning tmux and i can use it anywhere. and of course nohup functionality is builtin by definition. i have said it before and i can say it again: terminals come and go, tmux stays.

killerstorm 4y ago

A GPU-accelerated terminal emulator sounds like a nuclear-powered kitchen mixer to me. Like, why? Over 20 years of using terminal emulators not even single time I was like "Man, I wish my terminal was faster". Is this just a fun project to do, like, "yay, I wrote a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator!"?

naikrovek 4y ago
because rendering on the CPU is CPU-intensive when there's a lot of stuff scrolling by. even on an integrated GPU, text rendering is far faster when you use the GPU to render glyphs to a texture then display the texture instead of just displaying the glyphs individually with the CPU.
- chupasaurus 4y ago
  Then what about the existence of Konsole?
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    it's existence is irrelevant. how does it perform? this conversation is about performance.
    - chupasaurus 4y ago
      Better in latency and throughput without GPU-accelerated rendering while being feature-rich, that's the point.
      - naikrovek 4y ago
        forgive me if i don't take your word for it. I remember K-everything being slow as molasses and have avoided K-anything since.
        v3ss0n 4y ago

pablo1 4y ago

I agree with you, but stuck with wezterm for some time now for it's non-GPU related features. Specifically the font configuration with fallbacks and configurable font features such as ligatures and glyph variations is nice. I use a tiling window manager and a terminal multiplexer, so I have no use for terminal tabs/splits/panes. I wish there was something as "simple" as alacritty, but with nicer font rendering.

Shorel 4y ago
Kitty (the Linux one) has ligatures support, and it is GPU accelerated.

supernikio2 4y ago

I love wezterm due to its ligature and colourscheme support, and the fact it's very clean and simple compared to, say, Konsole (I also generally use i3 leading to KDE apps not being the prettiest).

an-unknown 4y ago

> xterm was still better than most lightweight libvt-based terminals Even worse: although many terminal emulators claim to emulate some "ANSI" terminal or be "VT100 compatible" and so on, most of them aren't at all. Simply run vttest in your terminal of choice and be surprised, especially by how many of them fail at very basic cursor movement tests. One of the few terminal emulators which gets most things right is xterm. It's also one of the very few terminal emulators which even supports exotic graphics capabilities like Sixel/ReGIS/Tek4014. Nobody should underestimate xterm …

rowanG077 4y ago
Xterm is like that sleeper car. Looks basic but beats everyone if it comes down to it.
tmtvl 4y ago
The author of Zutty has a pretty comprehensive writeup around that: https://tomscii.sig7.se/2020/12/A-totally-biased-comparison-of-Zutty https://tomscii.sig7.se/2020/12/A-totally-biased-comparison-...

incrudible 4y ago

> I'm sure at full throughput the difference is there I am not. It makes next to no sense to me. Maybe if you have a highres screen and dedicated VRAM. Otherwise going through the GPU interfacing ceremony just adds overhead.

vidarh 4y ago

Yeah, as I keep saying in these threads, the performance needed to do "fast enough" terminals was reached no later than the 1980s, and while bits per pixel and resolution has increased since then, it has increased slower than CPU speed. It's not the CPU cost of getting pixels on the screen that bottleneck most terminals.