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Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

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Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#161

Post by self_awareness »

michaelmrose wrote: post #91
guitarbill wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kovid Goyal is infamous/known to be a bit toxic, see Calibre: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8213946 (and the setuid "issue": https://lwn.net/Articles/465311/ )

He seems to be sarcastic especially when needled, opinionated, sometimes incorrect, and willing to argue a point. On the other hand he actually fixes things. Even if you actually were paying money for his services, which most of us are not, which would you prefer an obsequious kind person who didn't fix your problem or a dick that did. I would take the dick every day of the week.

> I would take the dick every day of the week.

When I'm asked a question whether it's better to hire a dickhead that is an expert in some field, or a normal person that isn't an expert of this field but showing promises, I'm probably always going with the non-dickhead person.

Dickheads are hard to communicate with, they are lowering team morale, make teamwork harder so in the end expert dickheads are less valuable than non-dickheads.

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#162

Post by tmalsburg2 »

christoph-heiss wrote: post #118

Another GPU-accelerated terminal emulator is alacritty[0]. Although it has a lot less features than kitty and really is only usable with tmux (or GNU screen, whatever), it is more or less perfect for people who want their terminal to do just one thing and that one thing pretty fast. Disclaimer: Haven't tried kitty yet and using alacritty for a nearly a year now. [0] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

I tried alacritty some time ago on Ubuntu and in my tests it was considerably slower than urxvt. In practical use both are fast enough, no perceptible difference, but urxvt is much more mature.

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#163

Post by wiz21c »

boobsbr wrote: post #124
adamch wrote: post #33

I've been using Kitty for a month now. I really like it. It's slightly less usable out of the box than iTerm 2. The default shortcuts are very counterintuitive (no CMD T for new tab or CMD W to close tab). But editing the preferences is straightforward. I prefer it to iTerm because it's so. Damn. Fast. It's the only software (besides Sublime) I run on my laptop that actually feels like it's using the 40 years of tran…

Why do you need ligature support?

If you code in the console with this : https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode ??? Dunno...

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#164

Post by oever »

vanderZwan wrote: post #157
oever wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm on KDE on X. gnome-terminal does not work (easily) on my distro so I cannot measure that. I did measure xterm which takes over a minute for both tests and also stresses out X. None of the other terminal emulators did that. Still, I wonder if the terminal emulators could use less CPU and be faster if they refreshed only with the frequency of the monitor. An interesting insight from the tests is that the execu…

How about Terminology? https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology

Terminology 1.1 takes 26 seconds and 100% CPU on find and 15 seconds and 90% CPU on the bash counting.

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#165

Post by nosjwshere »

oever wrote: post #153
hd4 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you're on KDE (as am I) but it would be cool to see GNOME Terminal compared also. What I got from these results is that Konsole is already good enough to not bother switching.

Yes, I'm on KDE on X. gnome-terminal does not work (easily) on my distro so I cannot measure that. I did measure xterm which takes over a minute for both tests and also stresses out X. None of the other terminal emulators did that. Still, I wonder if the terminal emulators could use less CPU and be faster if they refreshed only with the frequency of the monitor. An interesting insight from the tests is that the execu…

an sdl based term would do that

https://github.com/Zoomulator/Terminate

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#166

Post by lelf »

rbanffy wrote: post #150
karakanb wrote: post #131

Please forgive my ignorance: what do these terminal emulators do better than a basic terminal application, such as Terminal.app? My work with terminal is quite basic, I edit a few files, execute a few commands and sometimes cURL something. Terminal.app has some basic colors, has tabs, and works out of box without any visible performance issues for basic usage. What improvements would these emulators bring to my daily…

You may have better font rendering (anti-aliasing support on low-dpi screens), faster rendering and scrolling, better support for terminal attributes (crossed-out, overline, italic, etc). iTerm does a lot of optimizations so it can render and scroll faster (I volunteered to add a feature to it, and I dug a bit through the code). For instance, iTerm supports italic, which Terminal.app doesn't. Gnome's terminal (vte, a…

For instance, iTerm supports italic, which Terminal.app doesn't

It does (just checked).

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#168

Post by lake99 »

sime2009 wrote: post #158
oever wrote: post #139

Two simple speed tests: time find ~ /dev/null takes 8 seconds alacritty takes 8.5 seconds and uses 75% CPU kitty takes 15 seconds and uses 100% CPU konsole takes 16 seconds and uses 100% CPU time for i in {1..2000000}; do echo $i; done /dev/null takes 8 seconds alacritty takes 16 seconds and uses 75% CPU kitty takes 17 seconds and uses 100% CPU konsole takes 16 seconds and uses 98% CPU

Can we not start throwing around these bullshit `time blah` tests. They don't measure what people thing they measure. It doesn't measure rendering speed at all. It does vaguely measure two things: 1) How big the buffer is on the terminal when it reads in lots of output. If the buffer is as big as the output then your test reports a figure close to the `/dev/null` test. Not useful. 2) How well the terminal is in SKIPP…

All that, and it gets worse. "time find ~" always reported something like 2.x seconds for me, no matter which terminal I used (kitty, alacritty, urxvt, st, konsole), but I know from observing the scrolling lines that it always took about 15 seconds in each terminal. It basically means the command has sent the characters to the buffer, and then exited, but the terminal has not finished rendering its buffer.

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#169

Post by matt4077 »

rbanffy wrote: post #150
karakanb wrote: post #131

Please forgive my ignorance: what do these terminal emulators do better than a basic terminal application, such as Terminal.app? My work with terminal is quite basic, I edit a few files, execute a few commands and sometimes cURL something. Terminal.app has some basic colors, has tabs, and works out of box without any visible performance issues for basic usage. What improvements would these emulators bring to my daily…

You may have better font rendering (anti-aliasing support on low-dpi screens), faster rendering and scrolling, better support for terminal attributes (crossed-out, overline, italic, etc). iTerm does a lot of optimizations so it can render and scroll faster (I volunteered to add a feature to it, and I dug a bit through the code). For instance, iTerm supports italic, which Terminal.app doesn't. Gnome's terminal (vte, a…

Terminal.app is orders of magnitude faster than iTerm, or any other alternative. As in: less than a second v 30 seconds for cat .

Re: Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator

#170

Post by matt4077 »

simias wrote: post #141
dancek wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Input latency makes for a bad user experience. People just usually don't notice it when typing as it's so common. See https://danluu.com/term-latency/ for measurements of some terminal software and discussion of why latency is bad. I'm not sure if Kitty is using GPU specifically to minimize latency, but it would be a good reason.

I work in video and as a consequence I tend to be very sensitive to latency (I've spent more hours than I can count trying to figure out subtle synchronization issues) yet I've just spent one minute trying to detect input latency on my st terminal (which fares pretty badly in the benchmark you linked) without success. And that's running inside tmux on top of that. That being said I think it is valuable to have a reas…

I would have said the same, until I recently had to boot into an UEFI shell.

Input was just so .... immediate? It’s really hard to describe, but it was surprisingly obviou.

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