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Life is too short for a slow terminal

mijndertstuij.nl

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Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#41

Post by tom_ »

DanielHB wrote: post #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.

It can affect shell subprocess startup time as well, which, depending on your setup and the tools you use, might be worth optimising for.

I don't remember when I did it, but it looks like I must have gone through this at some point (maybe due to using GNU Make a lot? Or perhaps it was some other tool) - my zsh setup does a bunch of autocomplete setup only in the interactive case, and it seems to help a bit with startup time, at least on macOS:

    % for i in {1..5}; do /usr/bin/time zsh -i -c exit; done # zsh in interactive mode
            0.05 real         0.03 user         0.02 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.01 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.00 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.00 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.00 sys
    % for i in {1..5}; do /usr/bin/time zsh -c exit; done # zsh in non-interactive mode
            0.01 real         0.00 user         0.01 sys
            0.01 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
            0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
            0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
            0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
For the interactive case, I don't really mind (within limits - the worst case, on macOS after a reboot, takes several seconds, and that's tedious). I also start new interactive terminal sessions fairly rarely.

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#43

Post by [deleted] »

bee_rider wrote: post #33

I 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…

[deleted]

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#44

Post by reddit_clone »

zeflonex2 wrote: post #2

[flagged]

If it is a one-off task, it doesn't matter if you use GUI or Terminal commands to do it. But more than once, terminal starts paying off IMO.

Here are some advantages.

  - It is repeatable, you can do the same exact thing you did before. With ZSH history + FZF, recalling a command is a breeze.

  - Auditability. The command in your shell history is there for you to revisit and servers as a permanent record of something you did (or didn't do).

  - A command line doesn't make a mistake at 10th time, due to fatigue, inattention etc.

  - Reusability. You may have to repeat the same command for different folders (or remote servers). A slight modification of the previous command will do it for you.

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#45

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"The single biggest win is what's not there: no oh-my-zsh, no prezto or plugin manager. I've honestly never understood the appeal of these frameworks."

"Most of these optimizations are about leaving stuff out. It's about being intentional and only adding things you're going to use."

I don't use X11 or a similar graphics layer, only textmode. Thus I don't use a terminal emulator

I don't use zsh. I use NetBSD sh

Smaller and faster

This is what I am comfortable with

Others may have their own preferences; to each their own

I might not understand others' preferences but that's their business, not mine

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#47

Post by fg137 »

DanielHB wrote: post #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.

I'd say your workflow is pretty typical, from what I am seeing.

Developers that are very heavily invested in terminal and (over) optimize their terminal configuration are a small but very vocal minority.

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#48

Post by dismalaf »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #17

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!

This. Ghostty is significantly slower than Kitty on my Arch setup. It's still fast enough I guess, but no reason to switch from Kitty for me.

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#49

Post by frollogaston »

DanielHB wrote: post #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.

I only notice how efficient my terminal is if something dumps a ton of logs to stdout. Sure I can pipe to a file and use vim, but it's convenient not to need to do that. And sometimes I have like 8 things going at once.

Re: Life is too short for a slow terminal

#50

Post by abejfehr »

shhsshs wrote: post #23
abejfehr wrote: post #12

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.

This wasn't an option for us because as an org we used their recommended hook (1) to automatically change node versions when switching directories, but it effectively undoes the lazy loading.

With mise you get the behaviour of automatically switching when you change directories effectively for free.

1. https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm#zsh

Edit: unless you aliased it to `node` or `npm`, which would be fine I guess but super annoying if you ran node or npm commands often. It is not worth the hassle, no one should use nvm in 2026 imo

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