41–50 of 96 posts
Built on Electron? Hard pass. The scourge of the modern age.
That said, although I haven't tried Tabby so have a slightly open mind on that particular case, terminals seem like the wrong use for web tech. There's no shortage of native terminals on any platform.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe my needs are just too basic, but I've not found much reason to look beyond Apple Terminal, GNOME Terminal, etc. Probably the only feature those don't come with that I'd like is quake-style dropdown, but I don't find that worth the quirks that come with e.g. iTerm2.
> Probably the only feature those don't come with that I'd like is quake-style dropdown, On Linux I use yakuake for that (was in the repo), added it to the startup applications for my desktop environment. On my Macbook Air I didn't find anything suitable.
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I like the ligature support in Kitty. Alacritty—I used it for a while but I didn’t really notice a performance advantage. I’m not sure what people are doing where terminal throughput really matters, and when Dan Luu did latency tests (admittedly, this was a while ago), Alacritty was middle of the pack.
Quite some time ago (~15 years?), I needed to repeatedly recompile SBCL from scratch, a process that produced multiple megabytes of output per second. I found that the gnome-terminal (which I was using at the time) increased compile time by ~4x relative to redirecting the output to /dev/null. Xterm only increased compile time by ~20%, but rxvt-unicode had no measurable overhead, so I switched over and only reconsider…
With large amounts of output, that can be a massive amount of time. As a really simple example, try `time dd if=/dev/random bs=1k count=1000` to print a megabyte of random data, vs `... > /dev/null`.
I'm not sure what the state of terminals is on other platforms, but on macOS iTerm2 is excellent - having every feature under the sun and very good performance. If performance is a bottleneck then Alacritty is even faster, but I've never felt performance limited in iTerm. This makes me skeptical about new non-native terminals. Usually the pitch is faster development so more features, but iTerm2 already being feature…
Is anyone else put off by infinitely customizable things? I used to love this stuff when I was a kid but now I just want things to work well out of the box.
I know myself too well. If I put the options and flexibility in front of me, I _will_ make use of them. Every time I hit something that's broken, doesn't work how I'd prefer, or is even moderately annoying... down the rabbit hole.
As to hopefully not to kick off a flamewar, I'll just say up front I'm wrong, an idiot, and I feel very bad about myself as I should--
But that was what finally got me onto an iPhone after over a decade on Android. I started with the ADP1 with all the hope and promise that an open platform brings. I was writing and replacing software on my phone, putting together shell scripts integrated with other tooling to automate things, etc, etc.
At some point life was just too damn busy and I stepped back and looked at all the things I want to do, and what would create the most value in my life... and messing with my phone wasn't anywhere near the top of my list. I wanted things to just work well out of the box and my choices in that matter to be basically inconsequential (if I can replace the dialer, now I need to spend brain space optimizing my dialer experience).
So I went and grabbed a phone where stuff purportedly "just works", does so in a way where I really don't get a say (I just have to learn to live with it--and I have), and more importantly when it doesn't work... there's fuck all I can do about it anyway. When it doesn't work I don't stress about it and it doesn't take up any of my time because it's not something I could fix even if I wanted to.
I'm not sure what the state of terminals is on other platforms, but on macOS iTerm2 is excellent - having every feature under the sun and very good performance. If performance is a bottleneck then Alacritty is even faster, but I've never felt performance limited in iTerm. This makes me skeptical about new non-native terminals. Usually the pitch is faster development so more features, but iTerm2 already being feature…
Maybe my needs are just too basic, but I've not found much reason to look beyond Apple Terminal, GNOME Terminal, etc. Probably the only feature those don't come with that I'd like is quake-style dropdown, but I don't find that worth the quirks that come with e.g. iTerm2.
I think that should be a window-manager feature anyway. Not sure about other platforms, but at least on desktop linux there are options to put any app into something like a quake dropdown.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oof. That’s some toxic conversation.
I feel bad for people whose projects get shredded on HN, especially from a place of prejudice, like reflexive Electron hate. But when I actually tried a bunch of Electron-based terminal emulators on Mac a few years ago... they all felt awful . They were slow in ways I did not realize terminal emulators even could be, and they often had extension ecosystems that were similarly slow and also buggy as hell. Maybe things…
What can this do that iTerm2 can't?
One thing I think it has over iTerm2 is Broadcast across all terminals. It's fairly customizable. I prefer that over Tmux. I still use iterm2 as the daily driver, but have Tabby in my back pocket for moments I find it useful over iTerm2, which is rare, but not zero. I personally prefer iTerm2's password manager and regular expression triggers.
I'm not sure what the state of terminals is on other platforms, but on macOS iTerm2 is excellent - having every feature under the sun and very good performance. If performance is a bottleneck then Alacritty is even faster, but I've never felt performance limited in iTerm. This makes me skeptical about new non-native terminals. Usually the pitch is faster development so more features, but iTerm2 already being feature…