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Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

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Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#101
post #42

My question is what's their selling point, I used the past few years few terminals that have pretty good features: - Alacritty minimal and blazingly fast - Wezterm with batteries included - Warp even batteries included

Yeah I'd love to know what this is aiming for over WezTerm, which already supports both WebGPU and OpenGL rendering. Maybe just that it is closer to being able to run in a browser? I have to take a moment to just evangelize WezTerm a bit. I switched over from iTerm in the last few months and IMO WezTerm's absolute killer feature is its Lua-based configuration. You can do so much with it, down to running scripts on ke…

I'm also a WezTerm user for awhile now, Lua based config is definitely rad.

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Terminal.app is really bad at rendering Unicode block characters correctly. It doesn't space them correctly vertically, so if you have a lot of block chars it looks like total garbage. iTerm/kitty/etc. all render it correctly.

Have you tried messing with the line height in preferences? The font panel will allow you to set whatever you please

Yes, but I shouldn't have to do that, particularly when it works correctly in most other terminals.

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#103
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple didn’t get the memo it seems. Terminal.app has been unchanged in many, many years. I still stubbornly use it as my daily driver for some probably terrible reason.

I actually have the opposite problem. I’d like to limit terminal apps to just the 16 colours I have defined in my terminal settings (which is actually 3 colours in my case), but some apps (like the rust compiler e.g.) emit escape sequences which slightly change the shade in some places, in 256 colour space. I’d like to disable those 256 colours and limit everything to 16. I don’t think I can though.

[dead]

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#104
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile I have to wonder what's the selling point of these over good old urxvt? It has an ecosystem of perl plugins, which has all the batteries I need and more. In its daemon/client mode I can have 20+ terminal windows open and they consume sum total of like 30MB memory, with embedded perl interpreter and everything. I feel like one or two instances of these modern incarnations is enough to completely dwarf that n…

Well, if you search for these projects yourself and read the first few paragraphs on their websites, you might learn the selling points. Warp has a lot of features that are just not possible in urxvt.

Having seen them, there are two things I have to say:

1. I wouldn't say there really is much that would be "just not possible" in urxvt. If you drop down to Perl level, you can do almost everything (albeit you would have to write Perl).

2. The reason urxvt doesn't have majority of those selling points is because they arguably aren't the concern of terminal emulator at all. Things like better autocomplete menu, command editing, history browsing etc. historically fell under purview of the shell. You can have all these things with say zsh and a few chose plugins.

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#105
post #56

I would love it if I could run this in the browser over SSH to a remote server... Is that possible?

Not presently - browsers prevent access to ports like SMTP, telnet, SSH[0]. Which you definitely want by default - you don't want a random website to be able to access services like that from your machine.

[0]: https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/base/ne...

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#106

My question is what's their selling point, I used the past few years few terminals that have pretty good features: - Alacritty minimal and blazingly fast - Wezterm with batteries included - Warp even batteries included

This is anyway a niche market on Linux - you can go really far with gnome/kde default terminals, and even slimmer ones like xterm/urxvt/st are more than enough to perform all the necessary tasks.

Perhaps, on Mac, you badly need an alternate terminal app , because the default one is unbearably slow.

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#107
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple didn’t get the memo it seems. Terminal.app has been unchanged in many, many years. I still stubbornly use it as my daily driver for some probably terrible reason.

I actually have the opposite problem. I’d like to limit terminal apps to just the 16 colours I have defined in my terminal settings (which is actually 3 colours in my case), but some apps (like the rust compiler e.g.) emit escape sequences which slightly change the shade in some places, in 256 colour space. I’d like to disable those 256 colours and limit everything to 16. I don’t think I can though.

As a rust programmer, you can explain to us where in this source code the rust compiler is emitting these escape sequences for colours outwith the AIXTerm 16 colour set.

* https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/compiler/rustc...

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#108

As someone who still just uses whatever terminal emulator my desktop environment provides, what are the advantages of choosing another terminal emulator application? Also, what's the point of providing GPU rendering on the terminal? I've never experienced latency or any problems otherwise related to rendering, so I wonder why some terminals nowadays pride themselves in using GPU rendering. Am I missing something? Als…

It may have something to do with this mind blowing exchange between Casey Muratori (a highly experienced game engine developer) and the Microsoft Terminal team. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 It really highlighted how crappy software gets written in large corporations. They told him rendering monospaced fonts on the GPU would involve a multi year PHD research project. Apparently they then went on…

As it turns out, the thing Muratori suggested absolutely _didn't_ work for a large variety of edge cases. That was experimented with for a couple releases before being even _more_ substantially rewritten: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/pull/14959

I hate that what was definitely intended as a joke originally turned into this massive miscommunication and flame war. Admittedly tone is hard to convey on the internet, and italics is no replacement for a good old fashioned ":P". But this could have been a good place for everyone to work together, rather than flame one another.

It's certainly an experience that everyone can learn from.

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#109
post #106

My question is what's their selling point, I used the past few years few terminals that have pretty good features: - Alacritty minimal and blazingly fast - Wezterm with batteries included - Warp even batteries included

This is anyway a niche market on Linux - you can go really far with gnome/kde default terminals, and even slimmer ones like xterm/urxvt/st are more than enough to perform all the necessary tasks. Perhaps, on Mac, you badly need an alternate terminal app , because the default one is unbearably slow.

> the default one is unbearably slow

https://danluu.com/images/term-latency/loaded-terminal-laten...

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#110
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple didn’t get the memo it seems. Terminal.app has been unchanged in many, many years. I still stubbornly use it as my daily driver for some probably terrible reason.

I actually have the opposite problem. I’d like to limit terminal apps to just the 16 colours I have defined in my terminal settings (which is actually 3 colours in my case), but some apps (like the rust compiler e.g.) emit escape sequences which slightly change the shade in some places, in 256 colour space. I’d like to disable those 256 colours and limit everything to 16. I don’t think I can though.

I think you can set how the terminal presents itself in both tmux and regular Terminal.app

If the app doesn’t check for support and simply spills the control characters, there may be garbled output.

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