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Use Alacritty instead of Termite

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Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#131

Post by edflsafoiewq »

thayne wrote: post #110
bhaak wrote: post #3

> GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use. Choose your dependencies wisely. Sometimes only a crystal ball would have helped but often, a little bit of due dilligence would have prevented lots of upgrade pain down the line.

Sadly, I don't know of a good alternative to GTK. Qt, being C++ is more difficult to bind to from other languages, and doesn't seem to integrate quite as well with XDG/Linux standards, unless you use KDE which is a much heavier dependency.

This is why people use electron.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#132

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

akvadrako wrote: post #50
Cloudef wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome developers actively hate their users and non-gnome developers. This issue takes the cake: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

If that's your best argument against Gnome it seems like they are doing pretty well. Decorations can be done client-side with a library if needed - there is no reason to push that work to the compositor.

This is exactly why I’m sticking with X as long as possible. CSD makes absolutely no sense to me: under no conceivable circumstances do I want the window decorations to depend on which toolkit someone chose to use: it works out ok on macOS, I guess, but Windows/Linux each have their own issues with apps not having a consistent look and feel, and this just exacerbates that.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#133

Post by rkangel »

dleslie wrote: post #27
bhaak wrote: post #3

> GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use. Choose your dependencies wisely. Sometimes only a crystal ball would have helped but often, a little bit of due dilligence would have prevented lots of upgrade pain down the line.

Gnome has a fairly negative rep now, thanks in part to its repeated spurning of feature requests from developers and users. I remember when the Gnome desktop was exciting; there were frequently new apps to try, things pushing niche workflows that the Gnome team didn't consider. That all stopped with Gnome3.

> things pushing niche workflows that the Gnome team didn't consider

On the other hand Gnome3 is the first Linux desktop that I think is really non power user friendly. The laptop my partner uses at home is a slightly old Thinkpad I put Fedora on last year and it took her about 20 minutes to work out to use everything (less time than she took on a Mac).

I think the Gnome developers have been pretty hostile to outside input and could have done a better job. But the fact that they've had a clear direction and haven't implemented everybody's personal preference has resulted in a coherent result without unnecessary cruft.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#134

Post by zxzax »

traverseda wrote: post #124
zxzax wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't look like it, I'm sure they would be open to patches to help out there.

I'm a lot less sure, and the lack of clear requirements makes me even less certain. Also things like >adding only hooks for you means that all the other terminals get no benefit. Makes me quite concerned since these hooks weren't just for termite, as evidenced by tilix showing interest in this patch set. >Implementing this in VTE would mean ruling out having any flexibility in the terminal using the library. [...] an…

> I'm a lot less sure, and the lack of clear requirements makes me even less certain.

If you are interested to work on this patch, it wouldn't hurt to ask the maintainer for clarification.

>as evidenced by tilix showing interest in this patch set.

That's two of them, there are other terminals that use VTE.

>I think that the termite developer explained very clearly why the approach suggested by the VTE maintainer wouldn't actually solve the problem they were having

I don't think so, the termite developer is making that assumption before the new patch was even completed. Additional options could be added with the suggested approach.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#135

Post by db48x »

enriquto wrote: post #97
db48x wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed. A terminal’s job is most just to print text on the screen. You might be surprised at just how slowly that can be done.

Never had a problem with xterm's speed. In fact, it seemed snappier than gnome-terminal, especially when maximized.

Yea, xterm certainly isn’t the worst of the lot.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#136

Post by jarenmf »

bennyp101 wrote: post #19

I used to use termite, but switched to kitty for ... reasons I can't remember now. Does alacritty support ligatures yet? I've been using kitty because it does, but then I have issues with tmux in kitty ... I know, I want my cake and eat it

Same here, kitty is amazing. It supports ligatures and also BiDi. Both of which alacritty don't support. I wish kitty had sub-pixel rendering though.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#137

Post by forgotpwd16 »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #115
bionade24 wrote: post #13

When stepping away from KDE to sway, tried diffrent terminal emulators, but especially compared konsole, termite & alacritty. Back then (October 2020) I found alacritty to have really slow startup times on high-end machines (and got confirmation that's it's not my fault on IRC). Even massive Konsole started up faster. It also treats Wayland badly. So I settled with Termite, which I really like so far. It's sad that i…

are you trying urxvt? it have a daemon mode so each new terminal create only window but not whole new instance.

Urxvt normally opens in ~.2s on my ancient laptop and uses ~15M RAM. Though running it in daemon/client brings that time down to ~.04s and memory to ~1.5M per window, the possible hang/crash freezing/killing all terminals in the process probably isn't worth it.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#138

Post by bitwize »

rangerelf wrote: post #128
bitwize wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X11's been EOL'd, dude.

Keep saying that dude, maybe one of these decades it might even be true.

Maintenance on the xorg server code base has all but ground to a halt. The next release is nowhere to be seen. Eventually Red Hat just said fuck this shit and started rolling xwayland-only releases.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#139

Post by zxzax »

Cloudef wrote: post #120
_d7dt wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inclusion in wayland-protocols means that it had enough support without opposition. It doesn't mean that all the members are interested in implementing the feature. According to the members list, Weston and Mir are still important enough to have a vote: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b... >application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window. My reading of the protocol…

>My reading of the protocol is that even when the application asks for that, the compositor can still reject it, and the application must always provide a fallback to CSD. Yes this is correct too. I assume it was mainly put there for GNOME :) I honestly don't fathom why you would want to be CSD only in general purpose compositor aimed for desktop users. It can make sense in specialized cases. But then again I believe…

>I believe GNOME doesn't want normal users, but rather users that will always do what they want them to do, aka the Apple mentality.

I would not say this is true, GNOME just handles extensibility differently. If you want to help with this, please consider working on this issue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1053

That would pave the way for GNOME shell extensions to implement window decorations (and other wayland extensions) in a way that doesn't burden upstream maintainers and make them have to support every custom wayland protocol that is only used by a handful of apps.

>I guess this is the kind of end user experience gnome devs want?

I can't speak for them but I think they would suggest that those low level libraries all collaborate on a shared library to implement nice looking CSD, that way there is no code duplication and no dependence on GNOME libraries. Another option would be for them to copy the approach used by firefox, and use dlopen to access gtk functions and draw the CSD that way when it's detected they're running in a GNOME environment. Such functionality could be put in a library and wrapped up in 1-2 function calls, to make it easy to use. SSD might be the approach used by other desktops, but it is not the only way to achieve this functionality, and it may not even be the simplest.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#140

Post by Datenstrom »

I have never used Termite but I used Terminator many years for more features but mostly the window splits, I have also done a lot of Rust development so when I heard about Alacritty I gave it a test drive. One thing I did was run `find /` with Terminator and Alacritty side by side and Alacritty finished about an order of magnitude faster.

So I switched to tmux for tiling and use Alacritty now, not that I regularly dump so much text so quickly on the terminal but I was impressed with the engineering. I have been happy with it.

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