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Happy to see more folks working on fast terminal emulators! Earlier this year, I went through every single terminal emulator in Arch's repos and tested using t

Happy to see more folks working on fast terminal emulators! Earlier this year, I went through every single terminal emulator in Arch's repos and tested using them while compiling AOSP (Android). AOSP's Soong build system does not produce a lot of scrollback, but it does overwrite a line containing the progress ~150k times (once per source file). Alacritty was the only one that was both responsive and didn't eat up a CPU core (staying under 10%). Wezterm, Kitty, Foot, and Konsole stayed responsive, but used 100% CPU on a single core, causing a measurable impact to the build speed (though Konsole 23.08 seems to have regressed and now sometimes locks up). Most of the others became unresponsive or had multiple second delays trying to do anything (eg. ^C, opening new tab, etc.).

audidude 3y ago
What I was trying to show, and also why I have no interest in creating something out of Termkit, is just that we have a lot of low hanging fruit that can still be fixed. I'd rather do that work as part of VTE so all the applications I use benefit (including GNOME Builder, which I wrote and maintain). This was a fairly straightforward implementation of VT parsing and uses the retained render tree in GTK properly. There is no need to sacrifice CPU for GPU or vice-versa. You can literally do better in both directions while rendering at full frame rates.