Great post! There are some neat tricks around completion initing that I'll have to grab. I use fish shell and have done a bunch of optimization around async git statuses too.
Life is too short for a slow terminal
31–40 of 98 posts
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#32Speaking 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!
That happened to me too, turns out my desktop was software accelerated because I had screwed up the GPU config somehow. I asked Claude to fix it and it did.
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#33I know nobody is missing it, because it is the first bit of the blog post, but the author does have a follow-up where they note corrections based on push-back they received from a reader.
Apparently for some of the simplicity-produces-speed arguments, users have found complex/featurefull. tools that are still quick. I’m not sure how to evaluate this (I like simplicity just because it is easier to fit simple tools in my head) but we should note the counter argument (and applaud the follow-up).
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#34Speaking 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 know ghostty is designed to be super high performance but I find it both uglier and slower than Iterm2!
I started using it expecting to love it, but in reality it didn't seem to gain me anything but in fact was worse in several major ways. Also less configurable than Iterm2. :/
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#35On Cygwin, FWIW, it pays huge dividends to avoid making the shell fork at all costs. Don't use $(sed ...). Use ${variable%foo%bar} or whatever. Cygwin punishes you hard for unnecessary fork().
As it turns out, avoiding unnecessary fork() is good hygiene everywhere.
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#36In my life I can spare 50ms waiting for an terminal. But I have no time to spend 10000000 ms commuting to work, cleaning poop after an animal, or waiting for partner to put their face on!
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#37I read Ghostty runs in a single process, but whenever I tried something like that eg a client/server model in urxvt or foot, I ended up reverting, because eventually some weird state affected the daemon and had to restart it killing all my terminals, so nowdays I just run foot standalone, with sway tabbing and splits are kind of built into the wm anyways. But keep hearing about Ghostty and wondering if I am missing out on something.
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#38Speaking 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!
WezTerm is great too and, AFAICT, is everything Ghostty wants to be. Kitty is also very good, although WezTerm edges it out for having an integrated muxer.
I can't understand Ghostty either except as some kind of trendy memetic thing, the $GME of the TTY world.
Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#39I'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/
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Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal
#40Am 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.
I do the same, so there's a good chance you're (we're) the weird one