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Rio Terminal: A hardware-accelerated GPU terminal emulator
- NSPG911 1y agowas using it for a month, cool concept, it borrows stuff from alacritty for the base, added iterm2 inline images protocol, kitty image protocol soon but there are quite a lot of issues, mainly just really weird ones 1. splits dont feel like splits. unlike in something like wezterm or ghostty, rio uses a literal black line for splits, which cannot be controlled. it doesnt properly resize splits, which you can notice if you have like 4 splits active 2. tabs inherit from the previous tab's zoomed in height and width https://github.com/raphamorim/rio/issues/1196 https://github.com/raphamorim/rio/issues/1196 3. blur doesnt work on window (not that big of an issue anyways) https://github.com/raphamorim/rio/issues/1174 https://github.com/raphamorim/rio/issues/1174 4. some characters are broken (no clue how this happens) https://github.com/raphamorim/rio/issues/1192 https://github.com/raphamorim/rio/issues/1192 5. has issues with iterm2 while using yazi its a cool concept like i previously said, but it needs a lot of tweaking
- casparvitch 1y agoDoes anyone get anything out of these GPU accelerated terminals? I am at a bit of a loss for a use-case where my CPU isn't fast enough to keep up. What I do care about is my bitmap font, which all these new terms don't seem to like supporting.
- roylez 1y agoMy kitty configuration has grown too much and I could hardly memorise all the customisations. I use its remote control heavily for my workflow. Before kitty, I usually use xterm or urxvt, which are still cool and fast but I cannot go back to the days without those terminal customisations.
- casparvitch 1y agoYeah I understand all the flashy bits in kitty, but do you need GPU levels of speed? `foot` is much faster than my typing/brain in all cases.
- wredcoll 1y agoThere are genuinely moments where something in the hell-stack of terminal-bash-ssh-tmux is slow enough that rendering speed is affected and its annoying. Is this fixable by using a gpu? Probably not, but I'm willing to give it a try!
- zeppelin101 1y agoHow do you use the remote control of Kitty? I have barely explored it.
- bayesianbot 1y agoNot OP but - Terminal search and focus (you can list kitty tabs and windows and get the window content from the socket, implementing a BM25 based search is quite easy) - Giving the current terminal content for AI, so I can do things like run `ls` and then write "Rename the files (in some way)", and push the whole thing to LLM that replaces the command line without me having to write the full context I even have a Codex session finder that uses codex session files to list and select the session I want, and then uses the kitty socket to find and focus the window which matches the session content
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
- somat 1y agoIt probably does not matter too much, but the name collision with plan9's rio is a bit unsettling. There is enough domain overlap I was half expecting that someone had dug up the protocol and given it a new coat of paint for our modern systems. https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/using_rio/index.html https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/using_rio/index.html
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoI think drawterm fits that role? But yes, I had the same thought.
- anthk 1y agoriow doesn't have OpenGL but it sets down your RSI a little.
- keyle 1y agoA few months ago I've moved to ghostty and I have been very happy (minus a few bugs) Is this new terminal bringing anything I'd be missing on? Or is it a case of "made in Rust" vs. "made in Zig"?
- Ostatnigrosh 1y agoIt definitely seems to be that way.
- Klonoar 1y agoGhostty has far more attention to the little things, whereas the Rust terminal cohort gets to around 80% then usually languishes. It’s not so much the language as it is the people behind it. Hashimoto is just a machine and appears to know how to recruit well and when to delegate well. Potent combo.
- dragochat 1y ago...how do you search (history) effectively in ghostty? or are you not dependent on that feature?
- keyle 1y agoCommand+shift+J gives you a file link, you can then use your favourite editor to find or manipulate it to your heart's content. Coming from iTerm2 I was a bit disappointed at first. Now, I hope this feature stays because it means I can save logs easily, version them, compare them, etc. It's actually fantastic.
- fishgoesblub 1y agoWhenever I see a new interesting terminal emulator my main prerequisite to see if it's worth playing with is if it supports bitmap fonts, and unfortunately this one fails the test. I can't live without bitmap monospace fonts. I don't have a fancy 4k monitor so TTF fonts are blurry in comparison to a crisp bitmap font.
- crabboi 1y agooof good ppoint, would be good open an issue about it. I use the term and the maintainer is fairly active in responses
- JdeBP 1y agoYour thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354014 can probably be extended from that particular one to all terminal emulators that have "We use the GPU!" on the marketing features list, because they are all influenced by alacritty and Goyal's Kitty.
- fishgoesblub 1y agoMy main and side terminal (Alacritty, and Wezterm) are both GPU accelerated and support Bitmap fonts.
- JdeBP 1y agoThose two are already balanced by Zutty and Rio. So let's have a look around at some of the emulators that make using the GPU a marketing point. DarkTile (https://github.com/liamg/darktile https://github.com/liamg/darktile) accepts TTF and OTF, so presumably if you can get your bitmap font of choice converted into those formats you are alright. GhosTTY (https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty) gained proper bitmap font support just last month, the issues list says, but is reliant upon what FreeType and CoreText can handle. It has an open issue discussing those vis-a-vis bitmap fonts. Trap2 (https://github.com/tale/trap2 https://github.com/tale/trap2) likewise relies upon FreeType. Contour (https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour) at least appears to have bitmap font support. Alacritty, WezTerm, and Kitty get a lot of mentions in the issues list.
- crabboi 1y agothis terminal have a lot of potential ngl
- meatjuice 1y agoGhostty 2
- NSPG911 1y agoi would say it is more like alacritty 2
- dragochat 1y agoQuick question: can I JUST simply C-f (or smth else) to SEARCH the terminal for text without any extra complications? Like in macos default terminal and other sane ones? ...or is this another Ghostty geeksfest that wants me to C-S-whatever to dump history into a file then pipe it into a pager etc etc etc? [+EDIT: ...apparently not liking ghostty gets you downvoted too? weird amounts fanboysm and hype for an underfeatured and poorly documented terminal]
- NSPG911 1y agomight wanna check out https://rioterm.com/docs/key-bindings#search-actions https://rioterm.com/docs/key-bindings#search-actions
- jbstack 1y agoCan someone explain to me why I should want my terminal to be hardware-accelerated? I use my terminal to get stuff done by running commands and viewing the output. Sometimes I might run a TUI but I've certainly never found one that required a GPU to run. If I want to run a full-blown GUI I run it from my WM / DE. Am I missing something here?
- bheadmaster 1y ago> why I should want my terminal to be hardware-accelerated So your CPU can focus on doing useful computation instead of software-rendering the terminal.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jbstack 1y agoDoes the CPU really spend a lot of time rendering text output if I don't use a GPU to do it? My guess is that it would take away a vanishingly small fraction of the time available for useful computation - but maybe I'm wrong?
- bheadmaster 1y agoIn short - it depends on your CPU and your display configuration. On a 640x480 screen, a terminal will probably render fine with low CPU overhead. On a HiDPI screen, CPU may have millions of pixels to render for a single terminal window. It's not that different from other application programs IMO. DAWs and VSTs often offload rendering to GPUs to save as many CPU cycles as possible to get the latency down. I love having low latency in my terminals, so I prefer GPU accelerated emulators.
- ochronus 1y agoSooooo terminals are the new JS frameworks? :)
- OccamsMirror 1y agoOften built using the newest JS frameworks too!
- ochronus 1y agoPlease don't rub salt in the wound :D
- raphamorim 1y agohey there i am the author of rio terminal, please any issue found feel free to report in the repo. would help a lot, thank you all