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XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

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41–50 of 159 posts

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Offloads rendering to the GPU I don't understand this - isn't all rendering on a typical macOS or Linux desktop done via the GPU?

I believe the software has to take advantage of the GPU. The `foot` terminal renders on the CPU instead of the GPU, but beats GPU-accelerated `alacritty` anyway due to other effiency hacks described on their Performance page: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/wiki/Performance

There are various ways to take advantage of the GPU -- the so-called GPU-accelerated terminals contain bespoke OpenGL programs ("shaders") to do rendering on the GPU. Here's an interesting way of doing it: https://tomscii.sig7.se/2020/11/How-Zutty-works

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#42
You can get a tabbed xterm this way (From stack exchange):

Do sudo "apt-get install suckless-tools", then run this command to have a tabbed xterm:

    tabbed -c xterm -into &
Press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to open a new tab and Ctrl+Q to close a tab. You'll find more info in the man page for tabbed.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#44
> ...it turns out xterm has incredibly low input latency compared to modern terminals.

This boggles my mind. What on earth does a windowed terminal need to do that should result in any latency on a modern machine?

We had full ANSI-addressible displays that ran faster than the eye could read over serial lines in the 1980s. What on earth additional does a terminal program do and why would I want that?

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#48

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39... The Nongraphical GUI XCalc After Several Resizings https://miro.medium.com/max/434/0*LIDAYbj5NRANRGl7.gif X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the only programs that ran under the wi…

Don, did you ever figure out the difference between a "client" and a "server"?

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#49
Many years ago, I was surprised to find out that XTerm can also emulate a vector-based tektronix terminal.

The only application for it that I found was a previewer for TeX's dvi files that could render on the Tektronix terminal by drawing a lot of tiny horizontal lines.

Re: XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

#50
Something that I noticed recently is that the latency/input lag feels lower in xterm compared to unicode-rxvt.

I used urxvt from ~2011 until a couple of months ago and I have been really liking the speed and simplicity of xterm since then.

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