What's the energy use of these accelerated terminals like? Does using the GPU reduce power use on mobile?
Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
51–60 of 174 posts
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#52Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#53At the risk of missing something completely obvious: where's the "emulator" part in it? What is it emulating? It looks like a terminal (no emulator) to me. Not trolling, just trying to learn.
"Terminal" used to refer to a dumb computer that would send user input to a remote mainframe and receive instructions for drawing to the screen.
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#54At the risk of missing something completely obvious: where's the "emulator" part in it? What is it emulating? It looks like a terminal (no emulator) to me. Not trolling, just trying to learn.
If you can get through this, I highly recommend it.
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#55What problem is having a "fast" terminal solving? I've been using urxvt for years and have never really found it to be slow. Where might I notice a difference with these "modern" "GPU-accelerated" terminals?
I use Kitty, which is extremely fast, and I often avoid calling `tail` to print the end of a long log file: the terminal is so fast in displaying it that it's useless.
Another case is when you mistakenly invoke a command that produces a lot of output. With Kitty, terminal output is so fast that the output ended before I could reach Ctrl+C.
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#56Alacritty is cool and deserves the attention but I think wezterm totally underrated and does not get enough.
Why? Did you try both and what did you think?
I used Alacritty for couple of years, before switching to WezTerm almost a year ago.
There were two reasons for my change, the Alacritty devs are really obsessed with speed, which is good, but.. means less features, even _optional_ features like ligatures. I like ligatures, and because they slow down the rendering slightly the alacritty devs do not want to include it[0]
The other reason is that I wanted a way to have my terminal have two different colorschemes, light for the day and dark for the night. It seems that it might be supported now with alacritty[1]? But it does also seem like you need an external script still to do it..
I went with WezTerm because it supports both natively, everything else feels the same TBH, but the fact that WezTerm has more features that are optional, is what I liked.
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#57What problem is having a "fast" terminal solving? I've been using urxvt for years and have never really found it to be slow. Where might I notice a difference with these "modern" "GPU-accelerated" terminals?
You can feel it. Specially as 5e92cb50239222b says in throughput. Urxvt is not one of the slow emulators so you will notice it less specially at lower resolutions.
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#58What problem is having a "fast" terminal solving? I've been using urxvt for years and have never really found it to be slow. Where might I notice a difference with these "modern" "GPU-accelerated" terminals?
It's mostly about the perceived responsiveness which I think also shouldn't be understated.
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#59Couldn't get it to nicely play with WSl, I now use Tabby
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#60What problem is having a "fast" terminal solving? I've been using urxvt for years and have never really found it to be slow. Where might I notice a difference with these "modern" "GPU-accelerated" terminals?
Anything that dumps text on the console really fast.
An example I run into fairly often is untarring a backup in verbose mode. With modern NVMes, printing out the filenames to a slow console can be a bottleneck.