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Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)

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Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)

#111

Post by andrewmackrodt »

meatcar wrote: post #76
nickjj wrote: post #36

Author of the GitHub issue here. I was surprised to see this title, because I thought "holy cow, finally someone else appreciates low input latency" and then I realized it was my issue haha. By the way, wsltty 3.x also has excellent input latency now too. I've been using it for quite a while now with terminal Vim in WSL and it's about 90% as good as xterm on native Linux in terms of latency. wsltty also has no issues…

I just want to emphasize that wsltty is the only well-behaving terminal currently available for WSL. It's the only one that supports mouse interaction in a terminal like scrolling/resizing panes in tmux/vim, unlike any Microsoft solution. If you're using WSL on a regular basis, I highly recommend it. Its a huge quality-of-life improvement.

wsltty loaded via ConEmu is the only acceptable terminal combination I've found for Windows, with support for mouse events, scrollwheel and remote terminal resize detection, e.g. ssh into another box and run a program like htop. I last tried microsoft/terminal about 6 months ago and found it incredibly broken.

Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)

#113

Post by acdha »

bhauer wrote: post #88
nickjj wrote: post #36

Author of the GitHub issue here. I was surprised to see this title, because I thought "holy cow, finally someone else appreciates low input latency" and then I realized it was my issue haha. By the way, wsltty 3.x also has excellent input latency now too. I've been using it for quite a while now with terminal Vim in WSL and it's about 90% as good as xterm on native Linux in terms of latency. wsltty also has no issues…

Thank you for providing the praise to the Windows Terminal team many of us know they deserve, allowing us to just click the thumbs-up response on GitHub. I truly wish more modern software were capable of reaching this level of latency performance. I understand the response provided by "miniksa" at GitHub, but I don't feel satisfied by it. The maintainers of the frameworks that are described as adding so much latency…

> I fear computer science is often encumbered by a corrosive culture of "good enough" with respect to performance. We have a lot of baggage and urban myths about performance, from maxims about optimization handed down from the first acolytes of computer science, to modern opinions about UX that over-emphasize simplicity, to a repertoire of clever psychological countermeasures for under-performance such as animation. It's a shame that more people don't appreciate how much more enjoyable computing is when latency is nearly zero.

I wouldn't blame this on computer science: it's really just a long way of saying you get what you measure. It's not that computer scientists don't care about performance, or that human factors / UX isn't an entire field, but simply that most projects don't set performance goals or prioritize them and unsurprisingly most time is spent on the things which are used to judge someone's job performance.

This is especially true when you see how many issues are shared across teams — in this case talking about Windows it's important to remember that during the Ballmer lost years, Microsoft used stack ranking to force managers to categorize a set fraction of people as low performances and reportedly those rankings heavily favored new features over maintenance improvements. In an environment like that, if the change requires coordination across teams it probably just isn't going to happen unless someone very senior makes it a business priority.

Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)

#114

Post by z3t4 »

rwerkjlkjweq wrote: post #87
z3t4 wrote: post #72

I really wish there was a way for the browser to blit pixels to the screen in the shortest amount of time possible. Like talking directly to the GFX hardware using a restricted API like the Canvas 2d context.

That is literally what DirectX/Vulkan is for. They are the fastest API to blit pixels to screen (surfaces/textures as they call it).

I don't have high hopes for something designed by committee.

The Chromium team are experimenting with Low-latency (desynchronized) canvas, although I haven't been able to measure any differences in latency, the only difference is that desyncronization will cause some render issues.

I guess latency is a "full stack" problem where you have to design everything with low latency in mind. eg. keyboard, keyboard driver, render framework, gfx driver, and screen.

Here's an interesting article: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)

#115

Post by wirrbel »

rb808 wrote: post #28
wirrbel wrote: post #2

How I wish that I could use the new terminal app on the windows 10 build that is installed on my work Laptop.

Wow your work laptop is up to 10 already? We've started to plan our migration.

we even have WSL. I think someone in upper management pressured IT to either upgrade or start supporting Ubuntu laptops and that kind of got them going.

Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)

#116

Post by wirrbel »

Kipters wrote: post #12
wirrbel wrote: post #2

How I wish that I could use the new terminal app on the windows 10 build that is installed on my work Laptop.

is it because it's distributed through the store or because you're on a too old version of Windows? In the first case, you could probably build it yourself and install it on your own EDIT: you can download built packages from the Releases tab https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/releases

yeah, you can download it but not run it and my windows build is not recent enough according to the docs of microsoft/terminal

Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)

#117

Post by nickjj »

kgwxd wrote: post #67

I didn't realize how bad input latency had gotten in general until recently when I needed to boot directly into a terminal. Sometimes I could swear the character appears on the screen before I even hit the key. It's a weird feeling, but I would like more of it.

I know the feeling.

A few months ago I was installing Debian on a desktop, and there's this one part during the installer where it prompts you for some information before your desktop is ready to go.

The input processing was so fast it was stupid. It somehow felt even faster than xterm which is already so much better than just about any app on any OS.

Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)

#118

Post by bpizzi »

nickjj wrote: post #37
mikekchar wrote: post #3

I'm curious how alacritty compares to it. The alacritty devs basically consider another terminal app rendering faster than them to be a bug on their part ;-) But it does sound like it would be a good challenge.

Alacritty has kind of a lot of input latency, it's noticeably worse than wsltty and the default WSL terminal -- at least back when I checked it a year ago. I think some work has been done to improve it, but at this point IMO if you're on Windows then wsltty is as good as it gets for a general purpose terminal. If you're on Linux, xterm is top notch.

I don't know, I've got two panes here opened next to each other (tiled/xmonad) with xterm and alacritty, and I've been typing in those for the last 5min, and I really can't tell the difference (my monitor has 5ms latency).

Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)

#119

Post by mtrower »

cosmiccatnap wrote: post #104
mrkeen wrote: post #102

WSL terminal is garbage. Here's what irks me: * I click on the icon and I get a terminal up (nevermind that it doesn't accept focus on startup, so I start typing and the characters keep going to my task bar). * I type in "clear && ls" and hit enter. * My line of text vanishes and I'm left with a completely black terminal. If I scroll up with the mouse-wheel I can see what I should have seen (the output of ls). * I pr…

I agree, been trying to make this setup work for over a year now because I use Windows at work for a few things here and there but it's just not worth it really... You would do much better to install Linux and virtualize windows, then you get the best of both worlds. it's great that windows decided to add a terminal after every other OS has had it for decades but I think this thread is a bit like having rose colored…

Say what?

Exactly which release of Windows do you think didn't supply a terminal?

Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)

#120

Post by mtrower »

baybal2 wrote: post #15

Qt KTerm, and VTE both supported complex typographies close to 20 years ago and nevertheless achieve similar performance. It is a testament just how much behind times MS was up until recently.

From my perspective though, libVTE performance is terrible. On modern systems it may not be a concern, but on some of my older systems VTE terminals are unusable for any significant throughput of text (while xterm and rxvt run like greased lightning).

While I've never benchmarked them, the original NT console running on that same old hardware feels roughly in the same class as xterm. Per the dev response on the Issue, it sounds as though not too much has changed under the hood. If adding support for such typographies would put it in the same performance class as VTE, I'd consider that a serious regression (at least an order of magnitude).

Or are you saying that the Windows terminal has already regressed that far?

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