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Life is too short for a slow terminal

mijndertstuij.nl

21–30 of 98 posts

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#21

Speaking of slow, what I absolutely cannot comprehend is why ghostty is so popular. Despite being written in Zig it is very slow and a total CPU and memory hog. Just sitting there idle it’s pulling a constant 40% of my CPU? No thanks!

My ghostty is using 0.4$ - 2.5%?

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#22
Am I the weird one? I usually have 3/4 terminals open at a time and rarely open new ones. Terminal startup speed is a non-issue for me.

The only thing I demand to be fast on my terminal is grep reverse search (ctrl+r) and of course typing a character. But if your terminal can't keep up with your typing speed there is something deeply wrong with it.

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#23

I'm surprised people are still using nvm, considering it's impact on shell startup time. I can't recommend switching to mise highly enough: https://mise.en.dev/

I use aliases that lazily load nvm when I actually want to use it. This converts the shell startup penalty into a node/npm startup penalty.

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#24
post #14

Life is too short to waste time on things that don't matter.

Maybe I should remove the following bit of code from my profile?

    if [ "$SESSION_TYPE" != 'remote/ssh' ]; then
     if [ "${TERM_PROGRAM}" != 'tmux' ]; then 
      ( if [ $[RANDOM % 10] == "0" ]; then fortune -n 40 -s; else echo "Hi, $(whoami)!"; fi ) | cowsay | lolcat && printf '\n'
     else
      if [ "${TMUX_PANE}" == '%0' ]; then 
       fortune | cowsay -f small | lolcat && printf '\n'
      fi
     fi
    fi
It's a whole chain of interpreters firing up (sub-shells, Perl for the cow, Ruby for the lol, I think.) :D

But what would life be without a little bit of fun?

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#27

[flagged]

> Most of the time the GUI experience is the same or better than terminal tools I started to take your comment seriously until that line. You're avoiding leveling up and learning how to use the CLI. Whatever reason you are avoiding it for, understand that's what is at play here.

If what a person does during the day is mainly interacting with text then they need a tool for working well with text. Possibly this is an editor window inside an IDE. Possibly this is a shell in a terminal emulator. However, dismissing GUIs out of hand and asserting superiority of CLI is wrong. Far more disciplines need a GUI to get maximum utility from their computers than can get by with a CLI. Designers, architects, actual engineers, artists, lawyers, etc.

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#28
post #3

[flagged]

Depends on what you grew up on/learned I think. CLI was the only thing around when I learned so that's still what I prefer. It's one of those things where I think you use the tool that you are proficient with. No right or wrong, just different strokes for different folks.

I think, for folks who grew up in the early 2000’s at least, CLI is the way to go forward. The GUIs at the time were really quite good, it was after the really limited time of the 90’s, but before we started dumbing down GUIs for… I dunno, style I guess.

If you were raised on programs where most of the features were accessible at a button-click, without going through a bunch of hamburgers, modern GUIs won’t feel familiar, CLI will.

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#29

Speaking of slow, what I absolutely cannot comprehend is why ghostty is so popular. Despite being written in Zig it is very slow and a total CPU and memory hog. Just sitting there idle it’s pulling a constant 40% of my CPU? No thanks!

I suspect you enabled some weird setting that you've forgotten about. ghostty isn't unimaginably fast but it's faster than iTerm 2 which is plenty. And I'm sitting here with a lengthy Claude Code session open, as well as a couple tabs for my docker container and dev servers, and its idle CPU usage is 0.0%.
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