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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

#191

Post by jstimpfle »

zaat wrote: post #180
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.

I switched from Gnome Terminal after running large duplicity backup with -v failed repeatedly, apparently because the terminal didn't held the load. Switching to urxvt256-ml solved the problem.

When the terminal is too slow, the producer is throttled. This is called flow control, which is implemented by putting the consumer to sleep when the buffer from the producer to the consumer terminal is full. No backup program should fail because the terminal is to slow.

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

#192

Post by mjtribue »

hdra wrote: post #137
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 was pretty impressed when I found alacritty a while ago, but I stopped using it as I soon found out that pretty much any speed gain I got from using the terminal is pretty much negated from having to use tmux in order to have any form of window management..

Could you please provide more details on the speed issues with tmux?

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

#193

Post by Toorkit »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #105

I live and die by my emulator(Guake) :) Can't live without it !

I do something similar. I put any tty's I use in i3wm's scratch buffer and move it to the top. A key press then pops it up like a drop-down window without an animation.

I quite like Kitty compared to urxvt, which I was using before. Just looking at cmatrix, you can tell the difference. Smooth characters dropping down in kitty, sketchy 10fps on urxvt.

The only thing that bothers me is the theme being set in the config file. For urxvt, I put the theme separately in xresources and have a shell alias to change it (which then requires opening a new terminal, but that's what I use tmux for).

Maybe I can do something similar for Kitty, haven't really read the docs.

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

#194

Post by mkl »

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?

Not OP, but they are an essential component of some languages' writing systems, so it could be that.

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

#195

Post by jstimpfle »

mjtribue wrote: post #192
hdra wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was pretty impressed when I found alacritty a while ago, but I stopped using it as I soon found out that pretty much any speed gain I got from using the terminal is pretty much negated from having to use tmux in order to have any form of window management..

Could you please provide more details on the speed issues with tmux?

It's, well, slow. Haven't done any measurements, but it's noticeable. To do its work tmux must be basically another terminal emulator, and it seems it isn't the fastest at it. It's still strange, neither a little context switching (tmux is an extra process in the pipeline) nor doing the terminal things should amount to more than a millisecond. I think.

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

#196

Post by mpweiher »

Avamander wrote: post #178
sime2009 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please suggest better methods then.

A good stopwatch.

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

#197

Post by JdeBP »

krick wrote: post #51

I love this seemingly new tendency of re-building the most basic things with much better design choices than originally made in 90-s (or 70-s) — it's sometimes baffling how people are ok with using weird unintuitive tools all day every day, because it's always been this way and after spending a couple months on it everyone gets used to it. I mean, I love how user friendly (meaning configuration and all) kitty is out…

> I love this seemingly new tendency

It's not new. Just one example from the 1980s is NeXTStep, which did away with the cryptic Unix directory names (/opt/sfw, /usr/ccs, /usr/mbin, /usr/rbin, /usr/5bin, and so on) in favour of /Library , /LocalLibrary , /Apps , /NextApps , and so forth.

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

#198

Post by IshKebab »

dancek wrote: post #116
yason wrote: post #95

Why render with the GPU? I don't think I've seen a visually slow terminal emulator since 2000 and barely even in the 1990's. Text rendering is basically just blitting cached glyph bitmaps into a buffer, and CPUs have been more than overly fast doing that for eons. And CPU rendering has none of the compatibility problems/quirks that GPUs have. I can fire up a Gnome Terminal onto an unaccelerated Vesa X11 display if my…

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 would have thought using a GPU would make latency worse. GPUs are really good at throughput, not latency.

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

#199

Post by def_true_false »

snarfy wrote: post #187
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

I do not care about these numbers at all. How long between key press and character render? That's all I care about. 24 cores and still have lag when I type. My 7mhz Amiga 500 had a more fluid GUI than modern PCs. It's disgusting.

Significant part of that lag might be coming from the input device you are using. E.g. recently people noticed that one of the latest (?) Macbook keyboards had more latency than an external Apple keyboard.
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