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Foot – A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator

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Re: Foot – A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator

#61
post #55
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used KDE and absolutely loathed it. Admittedly this was fifteen years ago, but I was blown away by the developers’ inability to make any actual design decisions, instead punting literally everything to a mountain of configuration options. Case in point, the taskbar system clock. There were no fewer than six full tabs of options to customize its behavior, including the ability to use Swatch Internet Time. Everything…

Well, it's a matter of taste. But I find the latest version quite pleasant when using Krita's dark orange color scheme. I really, really, love how much I can customise though. I also try GNOME, Xfce, and Cinnamon every new relatively big release. And, as far as I'm concerned, really like all those projects. I must say though, I hate how GNOME locks you in to their apps. I understand their commitment, but for instance…

you can, with "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.default-applications.terminal exec foot" for instance.

GNOME is just as configurable as KDE; the difference is KDE bothers to make any of these settings discoverable.

Re: Foot – A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator

#62
post #17

I've been using Foot for a while now, having switched to it from Alacritty. I like it. I don't really require much from my terminal other than for it to "feel" snappy and to have some cosmetic customization, and from my own playing around, it does both well.

You sound like a fellow Sway user. I switched too for a bit, as it’s the new blessed terminal, but I had a couple glitches in a TUI app and switched back. Not really sure what I could have really gained by switching. They are both great.

Re: Foot – A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator

#63
post #58

Honest question: as somebody using the terminal mostly for things like ssh, screen and emacs in screen… why should i care about terminal speed?

Setting aside the fact that it's no fun waiting around when you accidentally cat a gigabyte log file to stdout, a more efficient terminal has two main advantages: it runs better on low-end hardware, and it uses less power to do the same job. If you have a fast computer and don't care about battery life, there's no real reason to switch.

Re: Foot – A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator

#64
post #17

I've been using Foot for a while now, having switched to it from Alacritty. I like it. I don't really require much from my terminal other than for it to "feel" snappy and to have some cosmetic customization, and from my own playing around, it does both well.

I tried it for a week or so on Ashai. It was super fast. However the lack of tab support ended up being a dealbreaker. Multiple instances are ok, but I prefer tabs at the top of my application.

It depends on what you want to manage your tabs. For example, a good tiling window manager will handle tabbing for you. In i3 Meta-w will swap into tabbed mode.

Re: Foot – A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator

#65
post #41
post #26

As someone who has dabbled in terminal emulation (I was the maintainer of Console Telnet for Win32 twenty years ago), I have respect for someone who takes the time to optimize a terminal emulator by building a fast parser and being careful with screen updates. That used to be the only way to make a graphical program fast, but these days hardware is so fast you can render an entire scene before the next screen refresh…

libvte is a big reason that GNOME Terminal tends to be faster than competing terminal emulators, including xterm and rxvt. One of VTE's tricks is that it doesn't bother painting the screen if the contents are going to be overwritten in the next frame anyway; you can scroll through megabytes of data in fractions of a second this way. The idea that it's slow, that's new to me.

I think this does almost every terminal, including rxvt (with the notable exception of Linux console).

Re: Foot – A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator

#69

> if you pronounce the foo part of foot the same way you pronounce foobar, then foot sounds a lot like the Swedish word fot wait... foo in foobar isn't pronounced like foo in foot??

What is your native language, and if English, what dialect?

For me, the "foo" in "foobar" has the same vowel as "toot", which is different than "foot". Do "toot" and "foot" rhyme for you.

I speak American English, from Boston/New England but without a strong Boston accent.

Re: Foot – A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator

#70
I was very impressed with Foot on my MNT Reform, where I was having trouble getting Alacritty to work (hardware issues too difficult to overcome, and I say that as someone who was able to apply a patch to make Alacritty run on my Pinebook Pro before the mainline version supported the hardware). Foot installed and ran like a breeze, and never felt slow even with pretty minimal hardware.
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