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Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

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Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#3

Post by goodmythical »

My terminal is not burning battery anywhere at all like mining bitcoin, and neither is yours.

If you're not benefitting from the ability to offload your terminal rendering to GPU, why are you using a terminal that offloads terminal rendering to GPU in the first place?

Imagine running something massively CPU bound, but you've still got to spin up perhaps tens of terminals in order to simultaneously ssh in to multiple servers because you don't want to set up a remote monitoring solution because you don't want each of the servers to be running a docker image where SSH>htop would suffice.

There are plenty of situations in which one might want a terminal emulator offloaded to gpu. That you are not in any of those situations is no reason to write a hit piece throwing shade as if the packages mentioned are somehow bloated or inefficient.

Imagine whining about how you've got to pay adobe and use several gigabytes of ram to resize jpgs. You'd obviously be outside Photoshop's ideal customer profile, just as you are outside ghostty et al's.

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#4

Post by goodmythical »

Computer0 wrote: post #2

I don't know that I have ever understood a reason to leave the native terminal included with any given OS, particularly after the Windows modernization pass in recent years on the terminal.

layout, multiplexing, tab-complete, history, using the same interface across multiple systems, ligatures...

There are lots of distributions that ship emulators that don't have modern features, and even among those that do, I still don't want to learn the individual quirks every time I hit a shell.

Gnome terminal, yakuake, ptyxis, cosmic, konsole, xfce4-terminal, qterminal, etc all have slight variations between simple things like rendering and more important things like hotkeys. It's nice to have an alternative that I can install on any system such that I can get comfortable with just the one. If I can't install anything I'm often stuck poking around to find whatever the devs version of correct is, or else asking the owner of the machine "okay, how the hell do I do {x}?" if they're comfy with their cli, but chances are if I'm sitting there it's because they're not comfy with their cli.

I could cover a lot of it with a bashrc file, but I wouldn't want anyone fucking with mine, so I'm not touching anyone elses.

edit: distrObutions->distrIbutions

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#5

Post by sghiassy »

Computer0 wrote: post #2

I don't know that I have ever understood a reason to leave the native terminal included with any given OS, particularly after the Windows modernization pass in recent years on the terminal.

iTerm2 has builtin native tmux integration

Game changer

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#6

Post by nick_ »

Computer0 wrote: post #2

I don't know that I have ever understood a reason to leave the native terminal included with any given OS, particularly after the Windows modernization pass in recent years on the terminal.

Same. Need multiple terminals visible at once? New window. Need a few separate sessions? New tab(s).

All the bells and whistles people have shown me over the years... it never even gets close to making me think "oh yea, that's better than basic tab/window management and the terminal app that comes with my OS".

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#8

Post by leephillips »

I don’t use MacOS or Claude Code, but I do use Kitty terminal on Linux, which the author suggests has the same issues that plague him using Ghostty.

Kitty is a magnificent piece of software that has radically enhanced the interface between me and my computer. And it does this while consuming negligible resources.

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#9

Post by rmunn »

exabrial wrote: post #7

All the stupid spinners at the prompt are obnoxious. Unfortunately it’s so trendy it’s impossible to reverse course

Good tools will have an option to disable the spinner. Haven't used Claude Code yet so don't know if it falls into the category of "good tools" by that definition. :-)
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