3 ms·

Can someone explain why iTerm is listed as "not fast" here? iTerm has been my primary terminal for over a decade and I keep coming back after trying alternative

by Kovah 2y ago

Can someone explain why iTerm is listed as "not fast" here? iTerm has been my primary terminal for over a decade and I keep coming back after trying alternatives like Warp, Hyper or Alacritty. And speed or snappy-ness were never an issue with iTerm.

nine_k 2y ago
Because iTerm is not fast. Try opening a fullscreen terminal and cat a long file. Add search / highlighting, repeat. Type something really fast; sometimes you can even notice the input lag, especially if you enable ligatures and other features. Install WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty; try the same. It's not that iTerm is not fast enough for most daily work. It's not that iTerm's feature set is not great. But there are faster alternatives, and in many cases, the difference is pronounced.
- ktosobcy 2y ago
  > Type something really fast; I just opened iTerm and started bashing keys on my keyboard randomly and there wasn't any lag. For me, for all intents and purposed it just fast. Cat a long-ish (10k lines, I know it's not that log but don't have anything longer at hand) and search with highlight and there wasn't any lag (and I'm quite alergic to it). BUT. I don't have any fancy shell prompt nor ligatures (don't see any point) and there is a warning that enabling said ligatures will impact performance...
  - drcongo 2y ago
    I can't get it to go slow either, I have a fancy prompt (Starship) and nerdfonts.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    See e.g. https://www.lkhrs.com/blog/2022/07/terminal-latency/ https://www.lkhrs.com/blog/2022/07/terminal-latency/ On a slower machine, 100ms latency is achievable, which becomes perceptible (not yet annoying). Output speed can be visibility sluggish if you add too much highlighting and stuff. I haven't touched iTerm for several years; maybe the modern versions are intrinsically faster, and modern hardware is definitely much.faster, so this could have become imperceptible.
    - ktosobcy 2y ago
      Hmm... there was a time lime 3-4 years ago where there was some slowdown (but I was on beta) but it was fixed. Nowadays I'm on MBP M1 (so already "older-ish" machine) and it works fine. I definitely notice latency when I'm connecting to a machine with ping over ~70ms so I assume that if I don't notice any delay then latency is low (?)

by Kovah 2y ago

nine_k 2y ago

Because iTerm is not fast. Try opening a fullscreen terminal and cat a long file. Add search / highlighting, repeat. Type something really fast; sometimes you can even notice the input lag, especially if you enable ligatures and other features. Install WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty; try the same. It's not that iTerm is not fast enough for most daily work. It's not that iTerm's feature set is not great. But there are faster alternatives, and in many cases, the difference is pronounced.

ktosobcy 2y ago
> Type something really fast; I just opened iTerm and started bashing keys on my keyboard randomly and there wasn't any lag. For me, for all intents and purposed it just fast. Cat a long-ish (10k lines, I know it's not that log but don't have anything longer at hand) and search with highlight and there wasn't any lag (and I'm quite alergic to it). BUT. I don't have any fancy shell prompt nor ligatures (don't see any point) and there is a warning that enabling said ligatures will impact performance...
- drcongo 2y ago
  I can't get it to go slow either, I have a fancy prompt (Starship) and nerdfonts.
- nine_k 2y ago
  See e.g. https://www.lkhrs.com/blog/2022/07/terminal-latency/ https://www.lkhrs.com/blog/2022/07/terminal-latency/ On a slower machine, 100ms latency is achievable, which becomes perceptible (not yet annoying). Output speed can be visibility sluggish if you add too much highlighting and stuff. I haven't touched iTerm for several years; maybe the modern versions are intrinsically faster, and modern hardware is definitely much.faster, so this could have become imperceptible.
  - ktosobcy 2y ago
    Hmm... there was a time lime 3-4 years ago where there was some slowdown (but I was on beta) but it was fixed. Nowadays I'm on MBP M1 (so already "older-ish" machine) and it works fine. I definitely notice latency when I'm connecting to a machine with ping over ~70ms so I assume that if I don't notice any delay then latency is low (?)