5 ms·
Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin
- Computer0 6mo agoI don't know that I have ever understood a reason to leave the native terminal included with any given OS, particularly after the Windows modernization pass in recent years on the terminal.
- goodmythical 6mo agolayout, multiplexing, tab-complete, history, using the same interface across multiple systems, ligatures... There are lots of distributions that ship emulators that don't have modern features, and even among those that do, I still don't want to learn the individual quirks every time I hit a shell. Gnome terminal, yakuake, ptyxis, cosmic, konsole, xfce4-terminal, qterminal, etc all have slight variations between simple things like rendering and more important things like hotkeys. It's nice to have an alternative that I can install on any system such that I can get comfortable with just the one. If I can't install anything I'm often stuck poking around to find whatever the devs version of correct is, or else asking the owner of the machine "okay, how the hell do I do {x}?" if they're comfy with their cli, but chances are if I'm sitting there it's because they're not comfy with their cli. I could cover a lot of it with a bashrc file, but I wouldn't want anyone fucking with mine, so I'm not touching anyone elses. edit: distrObutions->distrIbutions
- tom_alexander 6mo ago> tab-complete, history Those would be handled by your shell, not your terminal, right? > multiplexing If you have a good window manager, then there is no reason to have a bespoke multiplexing implementation in your terminal. I can stack my terminals and _any other window I want_ with tabs and switch between them using the same hotkeys/interface that I use for my whole system, rather than each app implementing their own tabs.
- cbarnes99 6mo agoSome people frequently or exclusively work on remote systems over ssh. Multiple windows is not an alternative to a multiplexer. They have some overlap in use cases. But it's not 1-1.
- tom_alexander 6mo agoIn that situation, the multiplexing wouldn't be handled in the terminal. You'd use something like tmux or screen. Seems irrelevant to the discussion about terminals.
- sghiassy 6mo agoiTerm2 has builtin native tmux integration Game changer
- nick_ 6mo agoSame. Need multiple terminals visible at once? New window. Need a few separate sessions? New tab(s). All the bells and whistles people have shown me over the years... it never even gets close to making me think "oh yea, that's better than basic tab/window management and the terminal app that comes with my OS".
- volemo 6mo agoThat requires a good window manager, which macOS does not have.
- nick_ 6mo agoFor the few times a month I need to have two windows/panes visible at the same time, I take five seconds positioning and sizing them then move on.
- graemep 6mo agoI need it all the time. large monitors are a lot more productive for any task that involves looking at more than one thing while doing it if you have tiling.
- KolmogorovComp 6mo agouse tmux.
- eddyg 6mo agoThere are tons of good options for window management these days. I’m currently trialing https://tangrid.app/ https://tangrid.app/ and it’s got some nice features.
- cyanydeez 6mo agotiling managers like Terminator are, to me, the most efficient. Something like Blender for hybrid customization might be a sweetspot. Blender allows for arbitrary layout and essentially tab control in any tile. <nerd snipe>
- 6mo ago
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- boesboes 6mo agoSplits. And tabs. But mostly splits. Nothing tmux and/or a decent window mangers wouldn't fix. But Macos.
- Suzuran 6mo agoIn my case, it's always been because the native terminal emulator had issues actually emulating terminals when connected to remote systems, it was intended to be only a terminal-shaped wrapper around the host system's shell.
- goodmythical 6mo agoMy terminal is not burning battery anywhere at all like mining bitcoin, and neither is yours. If you're not benefitting from the ability to offload your terminal rendering to GPU, why are you using a terminal that offloads terminal rendering to GPU in the first place? Imagine running something massively CPU bound, but you've still got to spin up perhaps tens of terminals in order to simultaneously ssh in to multiple servers because you don't want to set up a remote monitoring solution because you don't want each of the servers to be running a docker image where SSH>htop would suffice. There are plenty of situations in which one might want a terminal emulator offloaded to gpu. That you are not in any of those situations is no reason to write a hit piece throwing shade as if the packages mentioned are somehow bloated or inefficient. Imagine whining about how you've got to pay adobe and use several gigabytes of ram to resize jpgs. You'd obviously be outside Photoshop's ideal customer profile, just as you are outside ghostty et al's.
- exabrial 6mo agoAll the stupid spinners at the prompt are obnoxious. Unfortunately it’s so trendy it’s impossible to reverse course
- rmunn 6mo agoGood tools will have an option to disable the spinner. Haven't used Claude Code yet so don't know if it falls into the category of "good tools" by that definition. :-)
- justsomehnguy 6mo agoI like what you need to know a bazillion ways to disable all this unnecessary cruft. And people would be angry if you even note what you don't need it. I propose we should have some global switch to on/off these type of things, something like kern.fidget.widget=off or $VANILLA_PUMPKIN_LATTE=BROYEETSURE
- skeledrew 6mo agoProblem is, esp lately, Claude Code for example takes so long to respond that without the spinners and whatnot one may think the app is frozen or something. And even with them I still wonder sometimes.
- exabrial 6mo agokern.fidget.user-has-an-acutal-job-to-get-done
- fran3cc 6mo ago[flagged]
- soupspaces 6mo ago[dead]
- tekacs 6mo agoClaude Code has a reduce motion option in /settings
- leephillips 6mo agoI don’t use MacOS or Claude Code, but I do use Kitty terminal on Linux, which the author suggests has the same issues that plague him using Ghostty. Kitty is a magnificent piece of software that has radically enhanced the interface between me and my computer. And it does this while consuming negligible resources.
- YourDadVPN 6mo agoWhat does it do for you that, say, konsole, gnome-terminal or even xterm wouldn't?
- mlok 6mo agoI was wondering also. If it can help, there is an overview on Kitty's website : https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
- graemep 6mo agoCompared to Kitty, Konsole has image preview, click on files and links, tabs and tiles. Konsole does not have a way of changing the layout of tiles, equivalents to Kitty shell and remote control, pager, and the ssh integration (e.g. ls in an ssh session and Konsole will not open the file).
- throwa356262 6mo agoI dont get it. What exactly does kitty give use here?
- leephillips 6mo agoAside from its well-known features, such as displaying images directly in the terminal over ssh, I use it to create TUI applications. The application is a saved Kitty session, with a defined arrangement of windows. Each window runs a specified program, and communicates with the other windows over a Unix socket. Kitty has a convenient tool to create these sessions. Once created, I can start the session-application like any other program. The sessions are defined in a text file, so I can edit it to adjust the window arrangement or other details. I also use its shell integration features, such as putting the scrollback into a pager, constantly.
- bsder 6mo agoThe issue isn't the terminal. The issue seems to be that Claude is using React to render to that terminal at 60FPS like a goddamn video game Vibe coding is soooo awesome! And people thought that Electron was a resource pig. You ain't seen nothing yet.
- Bolwin 6mo agoYeah that was my first thought. Use a TUI that abuses the terminal to make a experience poorly recreating an actual GUI, don't be shocked if it doesn't turn out very efficient
- cyanydeez 6mo agoConsider how bloated data centers are when local models are now equally capable of human-scoped problem solving. Software bloat fills a void created by itself.
- anthk 6mo agoYeah, welcome to 1980, where a library coming from a roguelike shaped almost all the TUI's for Unix until ~2010 or so, Curses. A 386 could run NetHack at blazing fast speeds and read the news in a TTY perfectly well. A multicore machine can't get the basic thanks to the 'wonderful' JS. Heck, even s9 Scheme from http://t3x.org http://t3x.org ships a Curses module, enough to drive some text and maybe boxes/menues and it should fit in two floppies. A single one if the image it's generated later on-disk.
- otabdeveloper4 6mo agoVibe coding is unleashing man-made horrors beyond human comprehension on the world.
- archerx 6mo agoHave they not discovered event based rendering yet? Something changed, render! Nothing has changed, don’t render anything and keep the previous frame.
- bsder 6mo ago
- tdeck 6mo agoWithout all thw unnecessary headings, "color", and constant "Let. That. Sink. In."-esque recaps this would be 2 paragraphs. Just let it be! Readers don't need the slop.
- stuaxo 6mo agoI hate hate hate the style of writing LLMs make.
- disruptiveink 6mo agoCan't we just normalise publishing whatever you put into the LLM instead? I'm sure the author typed things into their favourite AI assistant that regurgitated that long form, LLM-speak style version. I'm sure the original prompt has all the relevant content and was a lot more pleasant to read. Can't wait for this style of prose to become an incredibly embarrassing faux-pas.
- ErroneousBosh 6mo ago> Can't we just normalise publishing whatever you put into the LLM instead? Something that has cropped up from time to time in the art world since at least the Dadaists was the idea that rather than distribute the artefact, you distribute the instructions to construct the artefact.
- tdeck 6mo agoI think if we want to combat slop we have to be honest about why it happens, and the honest truth is that a blog post whose whole content was "I was only using the terminal and Claude code for a couple hours and it drained my whole battery wtf write me an article about this" would not be gaining traction. Some amount of polish and effort is needed, but we can still avoid the most annoying tropes.
- HomeDeLaPot 6mo agoSounds like a viral Tweet. Why wouldn't it be able to gain traction?
- anthk 6mo ago>Zaragoza, Hotel Pilar Plaza café. I won't use neither Claude, nor a MacBook; I would just keep chilling out programming with decent tools and a bare XTerm to accomplish the rest. I can get Aragonese bricks ^U sweets in the meanwhile. On Terminal.app, I wonder if the GNUStep eversion and the ones bundled with Mac OSX shared some code.
- deafpolygon 6mo agoThis, among many other reasons, is why I still use Terminal.app. I switched to iTerm for true color, but when Tahoe added it to Terminal.app- I switched back.
- gmerc 6mo agoFucking AI slop
- efilife 6mo agoMy exact reaction. Good to see more people think like this
- HomeDeLaPot 6mo agoYou're missing the point—we are each supposed to have our agent summarize the key points for us so we don't have to read all the generated slop! Let me do that now: hmm, this article seems to be a complaint about applications that waste energy.
- Shalomboy 6mo agoI know people have their gripes with KDE, but Konsole has had a lot of these features for some time now.
- HomeDeLaPot 6mo ago[dead]
- sombragris 6mo agoI'm not a ghostty user (and neither a MacOS user). I use Plasma 6 and yakuake (which uses konsolepart; that is, it's based on Konsole, Plasma's default terminal emulator) is fairly economical in its battery usage. So, my terminal, while it could perhaps improve in its battery usage, does not behave like this.