Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by Twirrim » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

twtw wrote: post #266

nerdponx wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the only software (besides Sublime) I run on my laptop that actually feels like it's using the 40 years of transistor improvements I'm paying for. I wish more software fell into this category. It's still a little odd to me that something as conceptually simple as a terminal emulator should require a full blown GPU in order to perform smoothly.

Why? Everything that seems smooth is that way because of the GPU.

It's a terminal. Text on a plain background shouldn't be hard to do. It shouldn't involve lots of fancy hardware. We've been doing it for decades with significantly less latency on significantly slower hardware.

If you want to see just how fast it can be, grab a linux instance, press ctrl+f1 to drop to a GUI free terminal and see just how responsive and how fast it can run.

It's kind of nuts that we have to rely on something as powerful as hardware acceleration via GPU to make plain text rendering on a screen in a GUI approach the same speed as CPU rendered text in a straight terminal console.

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

#272

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

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

[deleted]

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

#273

Post by lenkite » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:40 PM UTC

jaxn wrote: post #24

I wish this ran in Windows so I could use it with WSL. WSL desperately needs a good terminal.

Take a look at wsl-terminal https://github.com/goreliu/wsl-terminal

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

#274

Post by vanviegen » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

Twirrim wrote: post #271

twtw wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Everything that seems smooth is that way because of the GPU.

It's a terminal. Text on a plain background shouldn't be hard to do. It shouldn't involve lots of fancy hardware. We've been doing it for decades with significantly less latency on significantly slower hardware. If you want to see just how fast it can be, grab a linux instance, press ctrl+f1 to drop to a GUI free terminal and see just how responsive and how fast it can run. It's kind of nuts that we have to rely on s…

To be fair, the text mode rendering you're using as a benchmark, is implemented in hardware as well.

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

#275

Post by laumars » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

zaat wrote: post #207

jstimpfle wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is most certainly reading from a drive, or from a TCP stream. Reading from CD-ROMs shouldn't be a problem either. In other words, I doubt that the terminal was the actual problem.

It reads from a drive, encrypts each file and writes it, so there is an element of a large buffer to hold. I Wouldn't think that the terminal is the actual problem, but running the same job side by side consistently failed on the gnome terminal and finished successfully on urxvt. On a side note, OP remark on CD-ROMs was regarding writing, CD-ROMs write feed had to be an uninterrupted, continuous stream, and the small…

Yup. It wasnt fun writing CDs back in then days

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

#276

Post by pitaj » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #249

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

>There are no benchmarks in which I've found Alacritty to be slower. It's actually very, very slow. https://danluu.com/term-latency/

I have a hard time believing this because it doesn't make sense that Hyper, an electron-based terminal emulator, would be faster than Alacritty.

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

#277

Post by rbanffy » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #231

rbanffy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's only supported if the font has a defined italic version, and it's unable to generate italic from a regular face.

Which is a major no-no anyway, typographically speaking.

We are talking about terminals. Italics used to be drawn by skewing the pixel clock.

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

#278

Post by btschaegg » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #269

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…

I'm having trouble putting this into words without sounding smarmy, so please, that's not my intention. How are you attributing speed to Kitty over iTerm? Wouldn't most of the sluggishness of anything be more attributed to the programs you're running in the terminal?

Try it. You'll be surprised. An amazing amount of lag comes from the routines needed to display the text some utility prints, not the utility itself.

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

#279

Post by twtw » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

Twirrim wrote: post #271

twtw wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Everything that seems smooth is that way because of the GPU.

It's a terminal. Text on a plain background shouldn't be hard to do. It shouldn't involve lots of fancy hardware. We've been doing it for decades with significantly less latency on significantly slower hardware. If you want to see just how fast it can be, grab a linux instance, press ctrl+f1 to drop to a GUI free terminal and see just how responsive and how fast it can run. It's kind of nuts that we have to rely on s…

It's on some crazy high resolution display. If you switch to text mode, your resolution drops a ton, and the required pixel pushing power drops accordingly.

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

#280

Post by mosdave » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

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…

A 747 cockpit looks pretty unintuitive to me, but the recognition that I don't know how to fly a 747 prevents me from passing premature judgement on it.