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Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

frr.dev

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Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#41
post #6

I don't know that I have ever understood a reason to leave the native terminal included with any given OS, particularly after the Windows modernization pass in recent years on the terminal.

Same. Need multiple terminals visible at once? New window. Need a few separate sessions? New tab(s). All the bells and whistles people have shown me over the years... it never even gets close to making me think "oh yea, that's better than basic tab/window management and the terminal app that comes with my OS".

I've always found tabs to be pretty limiting, though I have a ton of them in Firefox and Konsole since that's what's - been - available. They're marginal improvement over multiple windows. Then Horizon[0] came on the scene a few weeks ago and I fell in love with that infinite canvas. Started tweaking it like crazy, but now I'm working on a full port that natively supports Xpra[1], so I can have all my apps on an infinite canvas with views grouped exactly as I prefer. And that's the future IMO.

[0] https://github.com/peters/horizon [1] https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#42

I don't know that I have ever understood a reason to leave the native terminal included with any given OS, particularly after the Windows modernization pass in recent years on the terminal.

layout, multiplexing, tab-complete, history, using the same interface across multiple systems, ligatures... There are lots of distributions that ship emulators that don't have modern features, and even among those that do, I still don't want to learn the individual quirks every time I hit a shell. Gnome terminal, yakuake, ptyxis, cosmic, konsole, xfce4-terminal, qterminal, etc all have slight variations between simpl…

> tab-complete, history

Those would be handled by your shell, not your terminal, right?

> multiplexing

If you have a good window manager, then there is no reason to have a bespoke multiplexing implementation in your terminal. I can stack my terminals and _any other window I want_ with tabs and switch between them using the same hotkeys/interface that I use for my whole system, rather than each app implementing their own tabs.

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#43

I don’t use MacOS or Claude Code, but I do use Kitty terminal on Linux, which the author suggests has the same issues that plague him using Ghostty. Kitty is a magnificent piece of software that has radically enhanced the interface between me and my computer. And it does this while consuming negligible resources.

What does it do for you that, say, konsole, gnome-terminal or even xterm wouldn't?

Aside from its well-known features, such as displaying images directly in the terminal over ssh, I use it to create TUI applications. The application is a saved Kitty session, with a defined arrangement of windows. Each window runs a specified program, and communicates with the other windows over a Unix socket. Kitty has a convenient tool to create these sessions. Once created, I can start the session-application like any other program. The sessions are defined in a text file, so I can edit it to adjust the window arrangement or other details.

I also use its shell integration features, such as putting the scrollback into a pager, constantly.

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#45
post #32
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they not discovered event based rendering yet? Something changed, render! Nothing has changed, don’t render anything and keep the previous frame.

Dude, back off the buzzkill on my vibe code, man. I told Claude what I wanted, and it works fine on my machine. What kind of Karen are you that you expect me to check if it works for other people? I mean you have Claude, too, so fix it yourself. I've got more code to vibe and vibe to code. Later for you. Note: this is dark sarcasm just in case somebody thinks I'm serious. The problem is that I'm not really laughing b…

I’m sorry that you have to deal with that. I think if I ever get into a similar conversation I will just answer “but I don’t have Claude…”

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#46
post #13

Without all thw unnecessary headings, "color", and constant "Let. That. Sink. In."-esque recaps this would be 2 paragraphs. Just let it be! Readers don't need the slop.

Can't we just normalise publishing whatever you put into the LLM instead? I'm sure the author typed things into their favourite AI assistant that regurgitated that long form, LLM-speak style version. I'm sure the original prompt has all the relevant content and was a lot more pleasant to read. Can't wait for this style of prose to become an incredibly embarrassing faux-pas.

I think if we want to combat slop we have to be honest about why it happens, and the honest truth is that a blog post whose whole content was "I was only using the terminal and Claude code for a couple hours and it drained my whole battery wtf write me an article about this" would not be gaining traction. Some amount of polish and effort is needed, but we can still avoid the most annoying tropes.

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#47
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good tools will have an option to disable the spinner. Haven't used Claude Code yet so don't know if it falls into the category of "good tools" by that definition. :-)

I like what you need to know a bazillion ways to disable all this unnecessary cruft. And people would be angry if you even note what you don't need it. I propose we should have some global switch to on/off these type of things, something like kern.fidget.widget=off or $VANILLA_PUMPKIN_LATTE=BROYEETSURE

kern.fidget.user-has-an-acutal-job-to-get-done

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it do for you that, say, konsole, gnome-terminal or even xterm wouldn't?

Aside from its well-known features, such as displaying images directly in the terminal over ssh, I use it to create TUI applications. The application is a saved Kitty session, with a defined arrangement of windows. Each window runs a specified program, and communicates with the other windows over a Unix socket. Kitty has a convenient tool to create these sessions. Once created, I can start the session-application lik…

Does session management really belong in the terminal emulator?

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from its well-known features, such as displaying images directly in the terminal over ssh, I use it to create TUI applications. The application is a saved Kitty session, with a defined arrangement of windows. Each window runs a specified program, and communicates with the other windows over a Unix socket. Kitty has a convenient tool to create these sessions. Once created, I can start the session-application lik…

Does session management really belong in the terminal emulator?

I‘m not sure I understand the question. Some people use similar kinds of sessions in terminal multiplexers such as tmux (is that what you have in mind?), but this leads to problems (interpretations of key sequences, etc.) that the Kitty solution sidesteps.

Re: Your terminal is burning battery like it's mining Bitcoin

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

layout, multiplexing, tab-complete, history, using the same interface across multiple systems, ligatures... There are lots of distributions that ship emulators that don't have modern features, and even among those that do, I still don't want to learn the individual quirks every time I hit a shell. Gnome terminal, yakuake, ptyxis, cosmic, konsole, xfce4-terminal, qterminal, etc all have slight variations between simpl…

> tab-complete, history Those would be handled by your shell, not your terminal, right? > multiplexing If you have a good window manager, then there is no reason to have a bespoke multiplexing implementation in your terminal. I can stack my terminals and _any other window I want_ with tabs and switch between them using the same hotkeys/interface that I use for my whole system, rather than each app implementing their…

Some people frequently or exclusively work on remote systems over ssh. Multiple windows is not an alternative to a multiplexer. They have some overlap in use cases. But it's not 1-1.
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