Alacritty gets scrollback, publishes benchmarks • Hacker News Board

Re: Alacritty gets scrollback, publishes benchmarks

#31

Post by L0stLink » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

nullify88 wrote: post #30

L0stLink wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance is never a bad thing, even if I don't always need my terminal emulator to be able to handle large amounts of text, there is nothing wrong with having a light weight high performance (eventually cross platform, hopefully) modern terminal emulator. I read a while back that implementing the same in iterm2 (a popular macOS only terminal emulator) is challenging due to past design decisions [0]. Certainly in a…

> Performance is never a bad thing Depends on your priorities and what you are willing to sacrifice for it. High bandwidth terminal emulators will cost CPU and battery life. I'd opt for longer battery life. The choice is nice to have though.

I agree! currently I run windows as my main OS precisely due to inferior battery life on Linux. I only use Alacritty in minimal Linux VMs when they are not running headless(as pseudo containers, I will be migrating fully to Linux + Docker soon). I normally only work with the VMs while plugged-in and because Alacritty is not available for windows yet, have not used it much on battery therefore I am not in a position to say anything about the battery impact. One thing I have noticed is that it is noticeably slower to start on the same VM as compared to XTerm but the VIM experience was better in Alacritty.

Re: Alacritty gets scrollback, publishes benchmarks

#32

Post by L0stLink » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 3:25 PM UTC

O_H_E wrote: post #29

L0stLink wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance is never a bad thing, even if I don't always need my terminal emulator to be able to handle large amounts of text, there is nothing wrong with having a light weight high performance (eventually cross platform, hopefully) modern terminal emulator. I read a while back that implementing the same in iterm2 (a popular macOS only terminal emulator) is challenging due to past design decisions [0]. Certainly in a…

It is certainly not a bad thing, was just asking out of curiosity

Sorry I did not word that properly, I did not meant to sound aggressive, what I meant to say was that the high performance characteristic is nice to have even if there is little use for it. It is a breath of fresh air in the modern trend of building everything on electron. Having the option for a x-platform terminal emulator with a modern code base is an added bonus! One thing that I forgot to mention was that I particularly love Joe's approach to its development, (similar to suck less approach) changes and features are added only if they do not negatively impact performance (in a significant way) and if you do not want to enable them they can be disabled during build, completely removing them form the compiled program.

Also vim performance is really great inside VMs in Alacritty on my 6th gen core i5 laptop :)

Re: Alacritty gets scrollback, publishes benchmarks

#33

Post by lousken » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 1:18 AM UTC

jwilm wrote: post #2

Author here; I'm happy to answer any questions!

I hate the moment when I lose something in history so I've set my xfce4-terminal to 250k lines which was always enough so I've tried to set scrollback history to that number. Alacritty allocated 1.4GBs during startup while Xfce can keep it within 20MBs. Any plans to allocate memory a bit less aggressively if such high number is used? Sure, without scrollbar it's kinda pointless anyway but when it gets implemented it can be useful. Thank you

Re: Alacritty gets scrollback, publishes benchmarks

#34

Post by O_H_E » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

L0stLink wrote: post #32

O_H_E wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is certainly not a bad thing, was just asking out of curiosity

Sorry I did not word that properly, I did not meant to sound aggressive, what I meant to say was that the high performance characteristic is nice to have even if there is little use for it. It is a breath of fresh air in the modern trend of building everything on electron. Having the option for a x-platform terminal emulator with a modern code base is an added bonus! One thing that I forgot to mention was that I part…

There is a difference in performance in other Terminals?

Edit: oh, just saw your other comment

Re: Alacritty gets scrollback, publishes benchmarks

#35

Post by aktau » Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

This sounds great, especially the fact that v0.2 has much improved throughput over v0.1 in most cases. I must however echo some other posters' sentiments: latency is even more important than throughput, and alacritty's input latency wasn't great last time I tested it (quite a while ago). Maybe it's been improved too, though no mention of it in the post.