Why does one need 500fps on terminal ? I don't understand the need for the GPU.
The article explains the benefits only needing 2ms to render a frame, and how v-sync means it won't actually be displaying at 500fps.
Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust
251–260 of 491 posts
Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm. So, for that to work, I'd basically have to forever hardcode the terminal to launch tmux every single time. Basically, this new terminal + tmux = the old terminal behavior. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing (haven't tried it), I'm just saying this is the way to get my scrollback... uh... back. Might as well ship the terminal with tmux as a hard dependency and launch a tmux child process by default.
In a tmux workflow, you're generally not spawning that many new terminal windows, instead you ^a+c to spawn a new tty within tmux.
Sorry, but I want to keep multiple open sessions to different servers separate, even in tmux.
Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust
#253I'm the author of Alacritty, and I'm here to answer any questions!
I just wanted to say that this looks like a fantastic and very cool project! Congratulations on the speed. Personally, the lack of scrollback and tabs is a dealbreaker for me. I know that I'm supposed to use tmux for that, but I can never remember how tmux scrollback and tab switching work without thinking about them. Plus I rely heavily on mouse selection of multi-screen text in the scrollback buffer. So I'm unlikel…
Emoji support would be huge. I can't get this working on Linux, iTerm supports it well though.
Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the code, it looks like this basically only relies on two things: inclusive ranges, and clippy. But you don't have to use clippy this way; it's just one way of doing it. So it's really one feature. EDIT: Oh oops, and custom derive, which is stable in a month. > I really hope they're able to stabilize it In general, "nightly" is never going to be stabilized. Remember, it's how Rust development works. Some p…
Just for completeness, there is one other major unstable feature that Alacritty requires . #![feature(step_trait)]. I forget the precise details, but I believe this was required for using newtype wrappers as a `Range` for indexing. Specifically, the grid can be indexed as a range like grid[Line..Line]
I'm sure it can be replaced by custom trait work, though.
Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust
#255I'm the author of Alacritty, and I'm here to answer any questions!
Just another vote for scroll back - would not use without. I do use tmux occasionally but it is just too awkward beyond keeping stuff running in SSH. I also have a tiling window manager and since I use mouse a lot in browser and other GUI apps it's too much of a pain to switch to keyboard only navigation for the terminal.
Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very cool project, I'm trying it out, but this is an unrelated question: what is that Vim colorscheme in your screenshot? Do you have a link?
According to his dotfile repo[0] it is Tomorrow-Night-Bright. [0]: https://github.com/jwilm/dotfiles/blob/master/vimrc#L6
Good find, thanks!
Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I switched to tmux a few years ago and never looked back. What is your problem with mouse? I have quite basic tmux config, very basic terminal emulator (st) and enjoy mouse scrolling even in nested tmux scenarios. Selection is done with vim keybindings which is much faster than mouse especially if you scroll and look for something visually. I can relate to your feelings. In the beginning I was _very_ skeptical about…
I agree. I also have a very basic tmux/vim setup and I can scroll, copy/paste and even resize tmux panels with the mouse.
same. my tmux conf is really small (maybe 20 lines) and it does everything i want -- mouse support, vim keybinds, huge scrollback.
Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust
#258Wex wex exort!
Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust
#259Hm, if we're doing GPU rendering for speed, I'd suggest uploading vector glyph data to the GPU and rasterising on the GPU in the pixel shader, rather than using FreeType. See here: http://wdobbie.com/post/gpu-text-rendering-with-vector-textu... . The WebGL Demo is really impressive - it lets you zoom in and out on a multi-page PDF at speeds I haven't seen anywhere else.
This is not fast. It uses less texture memory but it is not faster than 2 triangles per character. This is why no one really uses this technique in a production system right now.
Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Features like ... are better provided by a terminal multiplexer I would strongly argue that this thinking is putting the cart before the horse. I don't use tmux, nor do I want to (though occasionally I have to use screen as a hack to keep programs running on remote servers, and I hate every second of it). Solutions like tmux arguably exist because terminals have poor UIs, and the terminal protocol is too weak to fo…
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. There's been a lot more pushback on the scrolling decision than I had anticipated. It's not something I want in my terminal, but it seems that a simple feature like this is essential for others. Perhaps I should reconsider. I worry that a "simple" feature like this may be overly complex internally. Performance with large amounts of output is also a concern. At least if we were to…
I've already tested alacrity and it's super easy to configure, the only thing stopping me from making the move is scrollback. I understand not adding tabs or a GUI config: I use my WM to do tabbing on linux even though my terminal implements tabs. However scrollback is an absolute must for me. If you implemented scrollback I would be able to switch terminals from terminology (at first glance).