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We had smooth scrolling on the VT-100. I hated it. I found it far too slow, even on low baud rates. The line was there, and you’re just waiting for it to mater

We had smooth scrolling on the VT-100. I hated it. I found it far too slow, even on low baud rates. The line was there, and you’re just waiting for it to materialize. This was a far different experience from watching the cursor crawl across the screen. There you didn’t know what was coming next. With the smooth scrolling, you did and were just, stuck, waiting on it. Personal taste, to each their own, but I hated it.

deleted 3y ago
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csdvrx 3y ago
> We had smooth scrolling on the VT-100. I hated it. I found it far too slow, even on low baud rates. It's a feature you can configure > Personal taste, to each their own, but I hated it. I have trouble understanding how someone can hate an optional feature. What you might hate is the default configuration. I've heard people complain about desktop switching effects on hyprland, saying they are too slow. I've found they're helpful visual hints, but we all have different preferences for "speed" By making the desktop switching effect happen within a smaller time budget, they are not intrusive at all. It's less "buttery smooth" but it feels better than the lack of animation, or the slowness of perfect buttery smooth: it's as if the visual system of the brain could use this extra information to better interpolate and keep a visual map. If you want smooth scrolling in the terminal, yet want to scroll text very fast (like when looking for patterns inside binaries), maybe drawing the pixel lines by packets of 5 will achieve the speed you feel comfortable with, while still providing hints to your visual system.
- simoncion 3y ago
  > I have trouble understanding how someone can hate an optional feature. That's weird. You have trouble understanding how someone could hate an optional feature and -because of that hate- turn that optional feature off and keep it off forever?
  - csdvrx 3y ago
    > You have trouble understanding how someone could hate an optional feature and -because of that hate- turn that optional feature off and keep it off forever? No, I have trouble understanding why someone might hate an optional feature that's either turned off by default, or that they can turn off with little effort then keep it off forever. The lack of the feature in the first place is more of a problem. With empathy towards people who might like the feature, you see the presence of the feature as a good thing, even if it's no use (or even an inconvenience) to you. If it's an inconvenience, what you hate is the default setting. Example: screen readers. I've been sometimes surprised by having Windows start reading text aloud after pressing a shortcut, but I then thought "actually, that's nice because people who can't use a screen have this great feature working out of the box"
    - sevg 3y ago
      OP didn't say "I hate this feature and this feature must be killed." OP even acknowledged that other people may like this feature: "Personal taste, to each their own, but I hated it." Seemed like a perfectly reasonable expression of opinion to me.
      - csdvrx 3y ago
        I understood that as hating the presence of the feature, so I got it wrong
      - simoncion 3y ago
        Yep. One can hate something while simultaneously acknowledging the reasonableness of its continued existence. It's distressing that (G?)PP either doesn't understand this, or is unwilling to spend enough time on reading what OP wrote to notice that this is the sentiment that OP is expressing about smooth scrolling on the VT-100.
        csdvrx 3y ago
        > It's distressing that (G?)PP either doesn't understand this, or is unwilling to spend enough time on reading I already know there are many things that I don't understand, but I'm willing to spend large amounts of time to improve my understanding
zh3 3y ago
I was never a fan either (some VT100 compatibles did it better than others, always too slow for my taste though). The one thing I did use it for was to collapse a complex display with lots of line drawing characters - customers were super-impressed by the smooth roll-up of the display as it changed from a complex input setup to a processing phase (done by defining a scroll region across a few text lines and simply outputting a new line feeds).
rbanffy 3y ago
With modern terminals, we can do much better - accelerate when there's backlog and even add motion blur if we feel like. It's not like someone will be able to read a wall of text scrolling past the terminal window faster than the screen refresh rate. It looks better if you have a 300 bps connection where you don't get angry by the delay it introduces. For a modern terminal, I'd suggest that the full backlog should be rendered in .5 seconds for it to still feel responsive. And yes - I know it's a complete waste of compute resources, but, then, I also like Cool Retro Term, and it uses more compute power than NASA used to send people to the Moon, and does that 60 times per second.
- aqfamnzc 3y ago
  I agree with you on acceleration. But motion blur in a terminal sounds like something straight from hell.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    Depends on the time you want the virtual shutter to be open. I agree with you it can get excessive if it gets too pronounced, but a long blur is also a visual indication a character jumped more than one line during the (virtual) screen refresh (virtual, because we want it to look consistent, regardless of refresh rate). It should also disappear before the characters settle into their grid. I'm a cinema person, so, for me, 24 fps is the right framerate for everything.
    - csdvrx 3y ago
      > I'm a cinema person, so, for me, 24 fps is the right framerate for everything. I have found that I like TVs using interpolation to achieve a higher FPS: it makes old movies feel more alive. Some people have reported they don't like the high framerate, as it make them feel they are watching a TV series. Could you recommend a modern terminal that would have the features you suggest? I'd be curious to try them to see how different it feels!
      - rbanffy 3y ago
wkat4242 3y ago
Yeah it should be so fast you can't actually read it, but slowv though so your eyes van track the line of text where your left off reading and know where to continue instinctively. Like a subtle cue. This is now really what most gui apps do when you press page up/down in fact.
neilv 3y ago
For awhile as a kid, I had smooth-scrolling on a terminal (probably a Wyse WY-50) on dialup 2400 baud, and I recall that being just about right for reading many lines of text as they scrolled on a non-cursor-addressing BBS. Characters would be received pretty fast, so your reading wasn't lagging by much.
- whartung 3y ago
  Back in the early days when I was working on a PET 2001, I wrote a routine to slow down the printing of text, so that it would look like it was coming from something akin to a 300 baud system. I wanted to make it look like a "real computer".
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    Now you can ask ChatGPT questions and get a similar effect.
dcminter 3y ago
At University over three years with perhaps 50 vt220 terminals hooked up to the cluster, I don't remember anyone using it other than when looking through the menu options. I think for the exact reasons you give. Reverse video mode was equally unpopular.
j4_james 3y ago
Smooth scrolling on the VT100 was 6 lines per second, but on later terminals you could adjust the speed to a certain degree, as much as 18 lines per second on the level 5 terminals. It's possible you'd still hate it even at that speed, but I wouldn't right it off completely just because you disliked the VT100 implementation.
gosub100 3y ago
would you be willing to try it on a modern terminal? unless I'm misunderstanding, you tried it on a VT-100 hardware terminal, which almost certainly means you were on a mainframe from 30+ years ago. If I'm wrong , please let me know. I realize that hardware-smooth-scrolling is different, and you emphasized that you weren't limited by the mainframe speed per-se, but I can't help but think these two 'smooth scrolling's are similar in name only. I can't picture how you could have the same problem with the smooths-scrolling feature described in this post.
- whartung 3y ago
  To be fair, I have not tried a modern version. But the way that I use a modern terminal, I probably would not care for smooth scrolling. Simply, I would not want anything hindering the dumping of information to my screen. I am no longer rate limited by baud rate, racing to hit ^S and ^Q to pause and continue the display output. Rather, I'll hit a command, let it dump however many lines it wants, and then scrollback in the buffer with the scroll bar to see what I missed. This also effectively pauses fast moving output as the buffer continues to fill while I'm scrolled back. If the information is still flowing so fast I can't make sense of it in my text window, I can either search on the text live, or Select-All, Copy a large swatch of it, switch to another window and paste it into an editor buffer and have my way with it. My terminal buffer has "infinite" scrollback. Yes, there have been times when I've left processes running over the weekend to come back and having my machine cratered with swap because my terminal buffer was far, far too large, gorged with logging messages. C'est la vie, I'll take that minor inconvenience over the flexibility of an infinite scroll buffer. The modern terminal environment for me is quite different from the old VT-100 days. Perhaps if the smooth scrolling was faster I would not have minded it as much back then, but it wasn't and I found the default VT-100 rate too slow. Data can scroll by too fast, but there was always other mechanics to pause and such that I can use as much or as little as I wanted, rate limited by me rather than limited by the terminal. I found that way much more flexible and suited to how I consumed information.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    Fair enough, thanks for the elaborate reply. do you edit text in the terminal? My main reason for wanting this feature is to be able to scroll up/down in vim; having the text jump a line at a time makes it slightly harder to read, which ads up over time. I think I agree with you that smooth output from command line output isn't necessary, and a fringe benefit at best.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

csdvrx 3y ago

> We had smooth scrolling on the VT-100. I hated it. I found it far too slow, even on low baud rates. It's a feature you can configure > Personal taste, to each their own, but I hated it. I have trouble understanding how someone can hate an optional feature. What you might hate is the default configuration. I've heard people complain about desktop switching effects on hyprland, saying they are too slow. I've found they're helpful visual hints, but we all have different preferences for "speed" By making the desktop switching effect happen within a smaller time budget, they are not intrusive at all. It's less "buttery smooth" but it feels better than the lack of animation, or the slowness of perfect buttery smooth: it's as if the visual system of the brain could use this extra information to better interpolate and keep a visual map. If you want smooth scrolling in the terminal, yet want to scroll text very fast (like when looking for patterns inside binaries), maybe drawing the pixel lines by packets of 5 will achieve the speed you feel comfortable with, while still providing hints to your visual system.

simoncion 3y ago
> I have trouble understanding how someone can hate an optional feature. That's weird. You have trouble understanding how someone could hate an optional feature and -because of that hate- turn that optional feature off and keep it off forever?
- csdvrx 3y ago
  > You have trouble understanding how someone could hate an optional feature and -because of that hate- turn that optional feature off and keep it off forever? No, I have trouble understanding why someone might hate an optional feature that's either turned off by default, or that they can turn off with little effort then keep it off forever. The lack of the feature in the first place is more of a problem. With empathy towards people who might like the feature, you see the presence of the feature as a good thing, even if it's no use (or even an inconvenience) to you. If it's an inconvenience, what you hate is the default setting. Example: screen readers. I've been sometimes surprised by having Windows start reading text aloud after pressing a shortcut, but I then thought "actually, that's nice because people who can't use a screen have this great feature working out of the box"
  - sevg 3y ago
    OP didn't say "I hate this feature and this feature must be killed." OP even acknowledged that other people may like this feature: "Personal taste, to each their own, but I hated it." Seemed like a perfectly reasonable expression of opinion to me.
    - csdvrx 3y ago
      I understood that as hating the presence of the feature, so I got it wrong
    - simoncion 3y ago
      Yep. One can hate something while simultaneously acknowledging the reasonableness of its continued existence. It's distressing that (G?)PP either doesn't understand this, or is unwilling to spend enough time on reading what OP wrote to notice that this is the sentiment that OP is expressing about smooth scrolling on the VT-100.
      - csdvrx 3y ago
        > It's distressing that (G?)PP either doesn't understand this, or is unwilling to spend enough time on reading I already know there are many things that I don't understand, but I'm willing to spend large amounts of time to improve my understanding

zh3 3y ago

I was never a fan either (some VT100 compatibles did it better than others, always too slow for my taste though). The one thing I did use it for was to collapse a complex display with lots of line drawing characters - customers were super-impressed by the smooth roll-up of the display as it changed from a complex input setup to a processing phase (done by defining a scroll region across a few text lines and simply outputting a new line feeds).

rbanffy 3y ago

With modern terminals, we can do much better - accelerate when there's backlog and even add motion blur if we feel like. It's not like someone will be able to read a wall of text scrolling past the terminal window faster than the screen refresh rate. It looks better if you have a 300 bps connection where you don't get angry by the delay it introduces. For a modern terminal, I'd suggest that the full backlog should be rendered in .5 seconds for it to still feel responsive. And yes - I know it's a complete waste of compute resources, but, then, I also like Cool Retro Term, and it uses more compute power than NASA used to send people to the Moon, and does that 60 times per second.

aqfamnzc 3y ago
I agree with you on acceleration. But motion blur in a terminal sounds like something straight from hell.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  Depends on the time you want the virtual shutter to be open. I agree with you it can get excessive if it gets too pronounced, but a long blur is also a visual indication a character jumped more than one line during the (virtual) screen refresh (virtual, because we want it to look consistent, regardless of refresh rate). It should also disappear before the characters settle into their grid. I'm a cinema person, so, for me, 24 fps is the right framerate for everything.
  - csdvrx 3y ago
    > I'm a cinema person, so, for me, 24 fps is the right framerate for everything. I have found that I like TVs using interpolation to achieve a higher FPS: it makes old movies feel more alive. Some people have reported they don't like the high framerate, as it make them feel they are watching a TV series. Could you recommend a modern terminal that would have the features you suggest? I'd be curious to try them to see how different it feels!
    - rbanffy 3y ago

wkat4242 3y ago

Yeah it should be so fast you can't actually read it, but slowv though so your eyes van track the line of text where your left off reading and know where to continue instinctively. Like a subtle cue. This is now really what most gui apps do when you press page up/down in fact.

neilv 3y ago

For awhile as a kid, I had smooth-scrolling on a terminal (probably a Wyse WY-50) on dialup 2400 baud, and I recall that being just about right for reading many lines of text as they scrolled on a non-cursor-addressing BBS. Characters would be received pretty fast, so your reading wasn't lagging by much.

whartung 3y ago
Back in the early days when I was working on a PET 2001, I wrote a routine to slow down the printing of text, so that it would look like it was coming from something akin to a 300 baud system. I wanted to make it look like a "real computer".
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Now you can ask ChatGPT questions and get a similar effect.

dcminter 3y ago

At University over three years with perhaps 50 vt220 terminals hooked up to the cluster, I don't remember anyone using it other than when looking through the menu options. I think for the exact reasons you give. Reverse video mode was equally unpopular.

j4_james 3y ago

Smooth scrolling on the VT100 was 6 lines per second, but on later terminals you could adjust the speed to a certain degree, as much as 18 lines per second on the level 5 terminals. It's possible you'd still hate it even at that speed, but I wouldn't right it off completely just because you disliked the VT100 implementation.

gosub100 3y ago

would you be willing to try it on a modern terminal? unless I'm misunderstanding, you tried it on a VT-100 hardware terminal, which almost certainly means you were on a mainframe from 30+ years ago. If I'm wrong , please let me know. I realize that hardware-smooth-scrolling is different, and you emphasized that you weren't limited by the mainframe speed per-se, but I can't help but think these two 'smooth scrolling's are similar in name only. I can't picture how you could have the same problem with the smooths-scrolling feature described in this post.

whartung 3y ago
To be fair, I have not tried a modern version. But the way that I use a modern terminal, I probably would not care for smooth scrolling. Simply, I would not want anything hindering the dumping of information to my screen. I am no longer rate limited by baud rate, racing to hit ^S and ^Q to pause and continue the display output. Rather, I'll hit a command, let it dump however many lines it wants, and then scrollback in the buffer with the scroll bar to see what I missed. This also effectively pauses fast moving output as the buffer continues to fill while I'm scrolled back. If the information is still flowing so fast I can't make sense of it in my text window, I can either search on the text live, or Select-All, Copy a large swatch of it, switch to another window and paste it into an editor buffer and have my way with it. My terminal buffer has "infinite" scrollback. Yes, there have been times when I've left processes running over the weekend to come back and having my machine cratered with swap because my terminal buffer was far, far too large, gorged with logging messages. C'est la vie, I'll take that minor inconvenience over the flexibility of an infinite scroll buffer. The modern terminal environment for me is quite different from the old VT-100 days. Perhaps if the smooth scrolling was faster I would not have minded it as much back then, but it wasn't and I found the default VT-100 rate too slow. Data can scroll by too fast, but there was always other mechanics to pause and such that I can use as much or as little as I wanted, rate limited by me rather than limited by the terminal. I found that way much more flexible and suited to how I consumed information.
- gosub100 3y ago
  Fair enough, thanks for the elaborate reply. do you edit text in the terminal? My main reason for wanting this feature is to be able to scroll up/down in vim; having the text jump a line at a time makes it slightly harder to read, which ads up over time. I think I agree with you that smooth output from command line output isn't necessary, and a fringe benefit at best.