Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer

wezfurlong.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 128 posts

Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer

#11

Post by samwillis »

mattbee wrote: post #8
samwillis wrote: post #7

This is an honest question. What is the advantage of GPU acceleration for a terminal emulator? I don’t do much low level graphics stuff, but a terminal seems fairly simple graphically, you are just drawing glyphs at xy cords. Would love it if someone had a good explanation. Obviously there are some terminal applications that could be redrawing very quickly, but that seems like a solved problem.

Is it more complicated than wanting to update the display as often as its fresh frequency? Faster screen updates, lower CPU & power usage. You might not notice the difference until you accidentally unleash a lot of output at once - then you'll see the difference. Some terminals start to update infrequently to save themselves, some hang completely while burning the CPU. Psychologically I feel more in control of my com…

I believe that there is a difference. I would just love to understand it better.

Does anyone have a benchmark of the differences? Is it like a 2-3x improvement or only much smaller? What is the actual latency?

Does anyone have any links to a low level explanation?

Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer

#12

Post by user-the-name »

samwillis wrote: post #7

This is an honest question. What is the advantage of GPU acceleration for a terminal emulator? I don’t do much low level graphics stuff, but a terminal seems fairly simple graphically, you are just drawing glyphs at xy cords. Would love it if someone had a good explanation. Obviously there are some terminal applications that could be redrawing very quickly, but that seems like a solved problem.

"cat 1_gb_of.txt" will push your terminal far beyond what just a CPU can comfortably handle.

Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer

#13

Post by pradeepchhetri »

I replaced iTerm with Wezterm 6 months back. It feels lot more lighter and faster. As SRE I need to work a lot on terminal. I tried Alacritty for a while but Alacritty not supporting horizontal and vertical splits was a major setback for me.

Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer

#15

Post by pradeepchhetri »

samwillis wrote: post #7

This is an honest question. What is the advantage of GPU acceleration for a terminal emulator? I don’t do much low level graphics stuff, but a terminal seems fairly simple graphically, you are just drawing glyphs at xy cords. Would love it if someone had a good explanation. Obviously there are some terminal applications that could be redrawing very quickly, but that seems like a solved problem.

Well, atleast the CPU will be free for doing other things by offloading some work to GPU.

Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer

#16

Post by codetrotter »

https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/keys.html

Happy to see that it includes support for clearing scroll back and that the default key binding for that is the same as it is in the Terminal.app that comes with macOS; Super + K.

I just might give this Wezterm a go on my own computers. And since Wezterm is cross platform with support for all three computer platforms that I use; macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, I may finally have a coherent terminal emulator on all of these operating systems. Provided that I find it a comfortable application to use :)

Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer

#18

Post by mattbee »

samwillis wrote: post #11
mattbee wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it more complicated than wanting to update the display as often as its fresh frequency? Faster screen updates, lower CPU & power usage. You might not notice the difference until you accidentally unleash a lot of output at once - then you'll see the difference. Some terminals start to update infrequently to save themselves, some hang completely while burning the CPU. Psychologically I feel more in control of my com…

I believe that there is a difference. I would just love to understand it better. Does anyone have a benchmark of the differences? Is it like a 2-3x improvement or only much smaller? What is the actual latency? Does anyone have any links to a low level explanation?

A really basic test is just type "base64 (ofc the differences might not be something you ever notice or care about)

Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer

#19

Post by petepete »

can16358p wrote: post #6

Serious question: how much does it benefit to accelerate terminal on GPU? Is it really worth the effort?

Lots and yes.

The effort has already been made, there are lots of very capable and stable GPU accelerated terminal emulators available.

The speed boost makes them worth using. If you've ever accidentally returned a minified file from grep you'll know most terminal emulators grind to a halt.

Post reply on HN