Use Alacritty instead of Termite • Hacker News Board

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#171

Post by accelbred » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #81

I have no beef with gtk/gnome and the like, but I find it really funny when developers use such colorful language. Still, as a heavy terminal user, I fail to understand what's the big deal with the choice of terminal. I have used only xterm for more than 20 years (with a short stint with gnome-terminal, and I didn't find any relevant difference). It starts instantaneously and doesn't make any fuss while it's running.…

For me the killer feature is truecolor support. 256 color is rather limiting, and with truecolor you can also use gui syntax highlighting color schemes. My actual shell runs in a neovim :term, with neovim running in alacritty, so I dont care about fancy terminal features other than rendering and colors.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#172

Post by Cloudef » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

zxzax wrote: post #168

Cloudef wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I assume that screenshot is a joke, the decorations don't look like that for me, they look small and unobtrusive. I'm not exactly sure how they look like currently, as I don't use gnome (nor wayland), but that was the latest PR regarding CSD I was able to find. >With respect, it's not. The client still must implement the semantics of the xdg-decoration protocol to tell the compositor that it wants a border. Sure in…

SSD only isn't really an option, from what I have seen, eventually app designers want CSD to reduce clutter and to give their apps a better native look. This is true on all platforms, see for example macOS Big Sur. >This is if they actually are. They are, you would see terrible breakage with every app if they weren't. Your dynamic linker is effectively using dlopen/dlsym under the hood, it's not doing any type checki…

>SSD only isn't really an option, from what I have seen, eventually app designers want CSD to reduce clutter and to give their apps a better native look. This is true on all platforms, see for example macOS Big Sur.

This isn't about the look of applications. This is about the needs of users and developers. I personally don't have window decorations at all on my main system, I don't need them and they are useless. There's developers that ask GNOME devs to implement a feature so their app can continue to work with GNOME users. There's users that ask GNOME devs to implement a feature so that app can work in GNOME. That's the point I'm trying to drive in here. GNOME devs feel like they can just break existing behaviors and ecosystems if they feel like it and say the problem is not on their end, while other groups have cooperated and worked on a solution that works for everyone. This is also the reason I don't use wayland nor develop anything for it anymore, too many things just don't work there, and the people that actually are trying to make things work or at least work on replacements gets constantly ignored or told to go away, meanwhile a single person has done a display server, that is not just wayland and xorg compatible, it's also much more flexible and more powerful than wayland ever is going to be. https://arcan-fe.com

>Your dynamic linker is effectively using dlopen/dlsym under the hood, it's not doing any type checking.

What I mean by typechecking is that with typical linkage + header scenario you get compile error if API changed (this won't prevent ABI breakage however). With dlopen/dlsym, if you have typo in your function pointer declarations, that can be hard to debug bug. Sure this can be avoided to make sure you generate such pointers from upstream headers and keep them up-to-date. There's also some other unrelated issues that can rise from this, like package maintainers having trouble to figure out what the real dependencies (or even the optional dependencies) of the application actually are, I've been there.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#173

Post by traverseda » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

zxzax wrote: post #161

Cloudef wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the bug report has lots of examples of why they need SSD or at least some other solution (libgtk doesn't work for all the use cases, e.g. vulkan, libdecoration doesn't look "native"), also including constructive feedback, but the gnome devs close it with reply "Enough spam for today. Locking the issue.", I consider them to be quite the jerks indeed.

>libgtk doesn't work for all the use cases, e.g. vulkan, libdecoration doesn't look "native" The solution there would be to fix gtk to support vulkan, and to fix libdecoration so it looks better. >I consider them to be quite the jerks indeed. Please stop, this is assuming bad faith and it's not helpful. The mutter bug tracker is an inappropriate place to give this unrelated feedback about this, when those issues you…

>this is assuming bad faith and it's not helpful.

When is it appropriate to assume bad faith? I think assuming bad faith can be very helpful if only because it tells you what to not support or depend on.

Saying "you have to use our library and also fix it for free" is a dick move regardless.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#174

Post by zxzax » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

jstimpfle wrote: post #170

zxzax wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's been a long time I've felt such an enormous disgust at the amount of neglect and arrogance that is being displayed there. Please do not assume bad faith. Type-ahead has some confusing usability issues, such as that it only matches against the beginning of the filename, which from my reading is why it probably will not be brought back. The way forward is to help get the current solution up to par. I feel your pa…

I don't assume bad faith, following Hanlon's razor it's obviously stupidity and probably a culture of arrogance engrained into a larger group (I know very little about the organization there, but there has been a lot of heated debate for years about other groups connected to redhat). How can they otherwise ignore such an obvious, massive load of complaints with dismissive and side-stepping comments? > Type-ahead has…

>How can they otherwise ignore such an obvious, massive load of complaints with such disrespectful and dismissive comments? [...] We're talking multiple or many seconds of wait and stress that this behaviour can cause, even on beefy machines.

I don't think the complaints were ignored, multiple other tickets with concrete work items were opened in response to the complaints. There is a ticket open to improve the speed. The particular suggestion for a fix was dismissed, but that's a separate thing.

>Please, explain to me, what exactly is confusing about that?

I personally find it confusing, in large folders I often don't remember the exact name. I don't think this behavior is particularly bad if the user knows what is going on, but going back to making it the default and de-prioritizing search can make it hard to find some files.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#175

Post by rkangel » Fri, May 07, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

rthomas6 wrote: post #141

rkangel wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> On the other hand Gnome3 is the first Linux desktop that I think is really non power user friendly. I think Plasma and Cinnamon also belong in this group.

I need to spend more time trying other things - I got bored of distro hopping years ago when I discovered that Fedora would mostly Just Work.

One thing I will say is that it's not just down to the desktop - all the main pieces need to be good and compatible and configured correctly for an overall smooth and intuitive experience. Gnome on Fedora does that.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#176

Post by zokier » Fri, May 07, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #142

zokier wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing with computers is instantaneous. I strongly suspect that there is at least 15ms of latency in your setup, and probably much more. Different people have different sensitivity to latency, just because you don't notice it doesn't mean it isn't there.

Well, you're right, technically. But in that case, all terminal applications have latency, so is your point that the parent's complaint is unfounded? In these kinds of discussions, the talk is usually about perceived latency not absolute latency. If it feels like there's basically none, then it's good enough. It doesn't mean there's absolutely 0.0 ns latency. > Different people have different sensitivity to latency T…

> But in that case, all terminal applications have latency, so is your point that the parent's complaint is unfounded?

All terminals have latency, but that doesn't mean that all terminals have equal latency. Point was that anecdotes about subjective instantaneity are pretty meaningless, especially without any reference point.

It would be much more meaningful to substantiate the discussion with actual data; the measurements done by danluu are one example https://danluu.com/term-latency/

Of course there can be quibbles about the specific methodology, but its still much better than having no data at all. Especially for something that is as measurable as latency is.

In general if you claim something is fast, back that claim up with some numbers.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#177

Post by zxzax » Fri, May 07, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

traverseda wrote: post #173

zxzax wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>libgtk doesn't work for all the use cases, e.g. vulkan, libdecoration doesn't look "native" The solution there would be to fix gtk to support vulkan, and to fix libdecoration so it looks better. >I consider them to be quite the jerks indeed. Please stop, this is assuming bad faith and it's not helpful. The mutter bug tracker is an inappropriate place to give this unrelated feedback about this, when those issues you…

>this is assuming bad faith and it's not helpful. When is it appropriate to assume bad faith? I think assuming bad faith can be very helpful if only because it tells you what to not support or depend on. Saying "you have to use our library and also fix it for free" is a dick move regardless.

If some person openly said to you that they wanted to hurt you, then I would assume bad faith. Please let someone know if that happens, in most open source projects that would probably be a code of conduct violation. I don't think people who say such things often would be very welcome in GNOME.

>I think assuming bad faith can be very helpful if only because it tells you what to not support or depend on.

I'm sorry I don't get what you're saying. You can decide not to support or depend on something without (incorrectly) assuming bad faith. This stuff is all open source, nobody can force you to use a library that you're not interested to use.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#178

Post by kart23 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

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…

Personally, I can't see a difference for startup times between urxvt and alacritty, both of which are near instant on my i3 setup, but I have heard of some users experiencing long startups on mac. I'd wager theres a bug there to be found.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#179

Post by traverseda » Fri, May 07, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

zxzax wrote: post #134

traverseda wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 woul…

I feel like you're not actually reading what I posted, which is frustrating. Like this:

>Additional options could be added with the suggested approach.

doesn't make any sense when the maintainer closed the ticket with "wontfix" in the middle of the discussion? Are we both reading the same thread? It seems like we're disagreeing about some fundamental facts here, but actually reading the ticket makes the facts pretty clear?

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#180

Post by traverseda » Fri, May 07, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

zxzax wrote: post #177

traverseda wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>this is assuming bad faith and it's not helpful. When is it appropriate to assume bad faith? I think assuming bad faith can be very helpful if only because it tells you what to not support or depend on. Saying "you have to use our library and also fix it for free" is a dick move regardless.

If some person openly said to you that they wanted to hurt you, then I would assume bad faith. Please let someone know if that happens, in most open source projects that would probably be a code of conduct violation. I don't think people who say such things often would be very welcome in GNOME. >I think assuming bad faith can be very helpful if only because it tells you what to not support or depend on. I'm sorry I d…

> This stuff is all open source, nobody can force you to use a library that you're not interested to use.

That's not strictly speaking true, especially when politics and money get involved. Unless you're using a very loose definition of "force" which doesn't include any kind of network effect at all.