Whenever I see a terminal emulator, my first question is whether it can do the VT-100 torture test.
WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
31–40 of 128 posts
Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
A really basic test is just type "base64 (ofc the differences might not be something you ever notice or care about)
But what's the use case for this? When do I actually need to DISPLAY megabytes worth of output as lag-free as possible on a terminal? There is no way for the intended recipient of displayed information (aka. the user) to process any of it, so what's the point of eliminating lag?
> But what's the use case for this?
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
#33Any Kitty users tried this? I’ve found Kitty to be exemplary so would be curious if anyone finds this an improvement?
Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
#34I will give Wezterm a try wheb tmux CC mode(show tmux panel as native window) support is done
Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
#35I switched from Alacritty to WezTerm a few months ago. I cannot overemphasize what a healthier project/community this is. The developer is surprisingly responsive and seems to be a good guy. Join the Matrix room (linked from the GitHub repo readme) if you have any questions.
Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
A really basic test is just type "base64 (ofc the differences might not be something you ever notice or care about)
But what's the use case for this? When do I actually need to DISPLAY megabytes worth of output as lag-free as possible on a terminal? There is no way for the intended recipient of displayed information (aka. the user) to process any of it, so what's the point of eliminating lag?
well... come to the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY
Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what's the use case for this? When do I actually need to DISPLAY megabytes worth of output as lag-free as possible on a terminal? There is no way for the intended recipient of displayed information (aka. the user) to process any of it, so what's the point of eliminating lag?
well... come to the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY
And what exactly is the use case for this?
If I want to work with images, animations, etc. I use a GUI library. These in turn already use hardware accelerated rendering.
And I already have powerful, optimized, tested, reliable software that enables me to work with terminal and GUI functionality side by side; the DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT.
Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
#38I switched from Alacritty to WezTerm a few months ago. I cannot overemphasize what a healthier project/community this is. The developer is surprisingly responsive and seems to be a good guy. Join the Matrix room (linked from the GitHub repo readme) if you have any questions.
I don't know anything about Alacritty.
What is unhealthy about the project?
Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
#39This 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 since GPU acceleration minimizes latency (because of zero-copy, all character textures are resident in video memory), that is a boon to perceived responsiveness. IMO that is the single most important feature in a terminal, next to correctness. It’s like typing on an old serial terminal.
Latency and throughput benchmarks don't confirm this. Eshell has one of the best latencies (that's why it feels so responsive compared to VS Code) but low throughput
Generally if you are barfing meg's of data to screen you're prolly doing something wrong... (You prolly wanna be using less?)
And of course your next keystroke is not zero copy. It needs to be sent to the GPU and the texture needs to be updated. GPU terminals seem to do this kinda slowly last I checked
Re: WezTerm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
#40This 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.
Terminals don't just render what you see, but everything that programs output, which can be enormous amounts of text, grinding non-accelerated terminals to a halt.
I don't know if they actually have to do this (It might be necessary for seamless scrolling?), but building some partial rendering might be more complicated than GPU acceleration as well.
I'd be interested if someone knows more about this.