As I broke away from windows a few years ago, I used the default terminal in popos, then got a Mac as my work machine. Then broke away from vscode to neovim and didn't like the default Mac terminal or iterm2, looked for a cross platform terminal, found alacritty and haven't looked back.
Are there other non-gpu accelerated terminals that would work just as well? Probably, but alacritty is installed, configured and works well for me
Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
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Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#82i do prefer kitty[0] if i want a modern terminal emulator [0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty
My understanding is that kitty has an automatic (opt-out) update feature [0][1]. I don't really like the idea of a terminal doing that. However I like the fact that kitty developer(s) actively improved the state of the terminal emulation with their new keyboard and graphic protocols [2]. [0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2481 [1] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544 [2] https://news.ycombinator.…
I certainly see Kitty is as a little crufty ("feature-packed" to some), but from my limited research it appears to be one of the fastest, so I can't really complain :-)
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#83i do prefer kitty[0] if i want a modern terminal emulator [0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty
Nice, I like lightweight and modern terminal emulators. Just installed kitty and compared it in a sloppy way to foot [0] (by running `xxd /dev/urandom` side-by-side) and foot appears to be faster.
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#84What 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 Cygwin's mintty on Windows, and the result of `ls` is not instantaneously there. If the windows is resized to big and there are lots of files, I can see each filename get printed out one by one. In Alacritty it shows the entire result immediately.
Also, you may have commands or scripts which print out a lot, like which file in a huge list is currently getting processed, where the entire execution time of the command depends mostly on how fast the terminal is able to print those messages.
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#85Initially the only terminal which supported Wayland. Never looked back ever since
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#86At 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.
This is a terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal#/media/File:... The software is just emulating the terminal behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal
Thank you. I think it's a bit misleading then to call it a "terminal emulator". It's not really emulating one of those old boxes, is it? It's providing a text interface to a computer's functions. That's great but it's not emulating anything.
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#87What 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?
alo of gpu accelearted terminals are actuallly very slow. because they add silly features. basic text i/o is almost always slower. even on a good gpu! :/
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#88As I broke away from windows a few years ago, I used the default terminal in popos, then got a Mac as my work machine. Then broke away from vscode to neovim and didn't like the default Mac terminal or iterm2, looked for a cross platform terminal, found alacritty and haven't looked back. Are there other non-gpu accelerated terminals that would work just as well? Probably, but alacritty is installed, configured and wor…
What reasons do you have for not liking iTerm and Terminal.app and what does alacrity do better?
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can ask these questions about pretty much every single performance improvement project. At the end there is always a win: - cost (this is more relevant to large scale infra perf opt) - UX (this is what a fast terminal might be achieving) - energy efficiency (because energy is super cheap these are often overlooked, however battery life might be still relevant)
> energy efficiency I care about energy efficiency deeply. But in a terminal? You can't be serious. Each terminal is in the end tied to a single person so there is no runaway scaling of instances possible. Your win in energy consumption is in the single digit watt-hours per person. One could probably compare the energy savings coming from the terminal rendering to the extra energy consumed by the developer trying to…
> But in a terminal? You can't be serious.
After reading Mitchell's writings about terminal development I am not sure.
> Each terminal is in the end tied to a single person
A popular terminal runs on millions of devices. This adds up quickly.
Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can ask these questions about pretty much every single performance improvement project. At the end there is always a win: - cost (this is more relevant to large scale infra perf opt) - UX (this is what a fast terminal might be achieving) - energy efficiency (because energy is super cheap these are often overlooked, however battery life might be still relevant)
> energy efficiency I highly doubt that offloading the rendering to a GPU is more energy efficient. I'm quite sure it's the exact opposite: GPUs are power hungry energy-eaters; commonly.