4 ms·
Although people wonder why anyone cares about performance in terminal emulators, it's more about caring about inefficiency in terminal emulators. There are some
by jchw 3y ago
Although people wonder why anyone cares about performance in terminal emulators, it's more about caring about inefficiency in terminal emulators. There are some legit cases where performance actually does come into play, like with high-throughput. Sometimes it's not even necessary, such as when terminal emulators do more work than they should processing data that won't be displayed; those things have the potential to impact the experience even when there is plenty of CPU and GPU to spare, like on a desktop machine. However, it's not just performance. It's also energy usage, particularly on small things like the Pinephone.
Linux being an OS where the terminal is as powerful as it is, it's really good to see a high level of attention to detail going to terminal emulators finally. Terminal emulators should be extremely robust and extremely efficient; and finally, they're getting pretty close.
- kgwxd 3y agoI never really cared, but when I first dropped into a proper terminal in Ubuntu many years ago using ctrl+alt+n, or whatever the combo is, it really felt like the characters were appearing on the screen before I even touched the key. That’s when I learned emulators have a noticeable lag. I still don’t care much, but it sucks to know it’s there, no matter how much I spend on hardware.
- pmontra 3y agoCtrl-Alt-F3 to console and Ctrl-Alt-F2 to go back to the GUI?
- Izkata 3y agoWhere the GUI is has changed over the years/by distro, so I use Ctrl+Alt+(right arrow) to cycle between them until I find it.
- mrob 3y agoxterm has no built in lag (your compositor will introduce some, but it's possible to disable compositing if you use Xorg). Kitty can be configured to have practically identical lag to xterm.
- SoftTalker 3y agoI've never used anything other than the default terminal in whatever system I'm working on, and can't say that I've ever noticed or thought that it wasn't "fast enough." I started using computers with a vt100 terminal back in the 300/1200/2400 baud days though, any modern terminal feels basically infinitely fast in comparison.
- jchw 3y agoOne thing that you could definitely miss is the gradual creep of latency. While throughput on terminal emulators is certainly infinitely faster than 300 baud physical terminals, latency has suffered a bit over time: buffering (sometimes to improve throughput) has added a frame here and some milliseconds there. Granted, I have Never used a physical terminal, but I believe some of them had enough circuity to locally update the cursor during line editing and whatnot, and if that was the case, in theory they should have excellent latency characteristics. On one hand, these latency figures are so small that they're usually difficult to directly perceive; who can even notice the difference between e.g. 25ms and 30ms of latency? That aside though, I believe it likely still negatively impacts the experience. Personally, it feels extremely pleasing to use a pre-compositing desktop environment on a CRT display; the lack of latency is visceral. I am so used to modern machines that it typically feels like it's updating before I have even performed the action. I think that modern terminal emulators and text editors in modern desktop environments on modern computers with modern peripherals run the risk of having latency bad enough that it actually, if only subtly, impacts typing. USB polling rates, relatively high latency 60hz panels, buffering from compositing, it all does add up over time for sure. Add SSH to the mix and it could legitimately make the difference between something feeling quite usable and something that is irritating.
- ramses0 3y agoLatency lost can never be recovered or never be parallelized.