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Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

blog.jwilm.io

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Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#31

Post by GrinningFool »

dom0 wrote: post #24
snuxoll wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you even had Control-C take forever to kill that `cat` you accidentally ran against a 1GB log file? I have. Most terminal emulators are 'dumb' and try to render the whole backbuffer sequentially even if what you are seeing is no longer the tail of the output stream. It's not so much that this is 'fast' (because even gnome-terminal which is not what I'd call crazy fast is 'fast enough' most days), but that it's m…

I've done that (we all did), but "can't reproduce". So this seems to depend a lot on the emulator, eg. I'm using Konsole, which is superb, and don't see that problem there.

Konsole is the only emulator I've used (other than actual tty) that doesn't have this problem. It's actually been frustrating, becasue there is plenty about it that I don't like.

I'll be giving Alacritty a try shortly - if it does what it says on the tin, it's exactly what I've been looking for.

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#32

Post by swsieber »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #25
jwilm wrote: post #2

I'm the author of Alacritty, and I'm here to answer any questions!

> and scrollback are unnecessary Um... that's kind of a deal breaker to me. Really no scrollback at all?

They suggest passing that duty off to tmux. Kinda makes sense I guess... though I'd love to have it.

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#33

Post by simlevesque »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #25
jwilm wrote: post #2

I'm the author of Alacritty, and I'm here to answer any questions!

> and scrollback are unnecessary Um... that's kind of a deal breaker to me. Really no scrollback at all?

Aw damn this is the deal breaker right here. As someone using a tiling window manager, this is pretty useless to me.

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#35

Post by llimllib »

> Make sure you have the right Rust compiler installed. Alacritty is currently pinned to a certain Rust nightly

Ok, I'll... um not do that. Hope you publish a build soon though!

edit: more seriously, the nightly compiler situation on rust is going to become a problem as it gets more developer use. I really hope they're able to stabilize it.

edit 2: I'm really sorry if I derailed the conversation in a not useful way, @jwilm

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#37

Post by rl3 »

detaro wrote: post #18
dom0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've literally never seen this problem. However, a terminal emulator + X11 and so on can eat a bit of a CPU with noisy processes, eg. the output of mpv eats maybe 5-10 %, because it updates every(?) frame, so maximum work for the whole display stack. Getting the terminal emulator out of sight can get a bit more battery life in these cases. (Somewhat related: If you have infinite scrollback it turns out that /tmp is a…

Sounds like an option to slow down output rendering to e.g. one 1 frame/s might be an interesting feature for a terminal emulator. Still enough to keep an eye on a long-running process, but less overhead?

Smart batching of similar output could be useful as well. Perhaps the ability to configure a similarity threshold.

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#38

Post by sanderjd »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #27
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and scrollback are unnecessary Um... that's kind of a deal breaker to me. Really no scrollback at all?

the use case seems to be using tmux inside the terminal emulator, with tmux you'd use its own scrollback buffer (edit) from the project's github page in fact The simplicity goal means that it doesn't have many features like tabs or scroll back as in other terminals. Instead, it is expected that users of Alacritty make use of a terminal multiplexer such as tmux.

Interesting - maybe this (or someone else) could skip the middle-man and just be a cross-platform tmux gui, instead of a terminal emulator.
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