Anyone else notice that typing directly on the tty is much faster than in a terminal emulator in X11?
Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)
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Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just want to emphasize that wsltty is the only well-behaving terminal currently available for WSL. It's the only one that supports mouse interaction in a terminal like scrolling/resizing panes in tmux/vim, unlike any Microsoft solution. If you're using WSL on a regular basis, I highly recommend it. Its a huge quality-of-life improvement.
I am fairly certain that the inbox console host supports mouse interaction (with WSL and anything else that uses VT mouse mode). As the engineering lead for the console and terminal projects, though, I’d love to know how else we can improve!
I noticed the same issues with tmux and the new MS terminal. The events got completely absorbed.
Also there were a bunch of "crazy" display issues, such as when minimizing the window about ~30% of the time the tmux status bar would become hidden.
Or after I exit tmux or even Vim sometimes without tmux, the terminal's background color would turn yellow (but not the entire terminal's background, just the characters where input / output would be legally able to be placed).
All of these things were discovered within about 2 minutes of using it, so these aren't edge cases. They happened very frequently, and things like the mouse just didn't work all the time.
Edit:
I just put together a 10min video showing a few of these display issues with the new MS terminal at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/puzbfs6ws4p8v7a/ms-terminal.mp4?dl...
The yellow screen issue never happened on video, maybe they fixed that but within 1 minute of using the terminal I found 2 new display bugs that weren't there when I tried it months ago.
Also sorry about the quality of the video. Drop box re-encodes videos at 720p (I recorded it at 1080p) and it looks like they are really strict with bitrates too. It looks slightly better than a potato, but you can still make out the display issues.
Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing called Windows 7.1. Windows 7 extended support ends January 14, 2020. Windows 8.1 won't end its extended support until January 10, 2023.
It most likely is a reference to Windows 7 SP1. I've never seen it written as "7.1" but that is probably what they meant.
Yes sorry, that was a brain fart. I did indeed mean SP1. The Windows SDK version is 7.1 so I got muddled.
Windows 7 (without SP1) is already unsupported.
Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)
#84Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)
#85I was excited about WSL when I first heard about it. But that excitement quickly faded when I realized most real apps, such as gcc, don't work under it. The best way to get a Linux prompt on Windows is to use Docker. Use the -v option to share your drive.
I've never had a problem with GCC. GCC is, like, my primary use case.
Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)
#86Author of the GitHub issue here. I was surprised to see this title, because I thought "holy cow, finally someone else appreciates low input latency" and then I realized it was my issue haha. By the way, wsltty 3.x also has excellent input latency now too. I've been using it for quite a while now with terminal Vim in WSL and it's about 90% as good as xterm on native Linux in terms of latency. wsltty also has no issues…
Can you post your computer specs?
Because it's impossible for me to see any difference between the WSL terminal and Notepad. I can see a tiny difference compared with Electron apps, but I really need to concentrate to see it.
My computer is no rocket, is a higher-end desktop from 6 years ago.
Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)
#87I really wish there was a way for the browser to blit pixels to the screen in the shortest amount of time possible. Like talking directly to the GFX hardware using a restricted API like the Canvas 2d context.
That is literally what DirectX/Vulkan is for. They are the fastest API to blit pixels to screen (surfaces/textures as they call it).
Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)
#88Author of the GitHub issue here. I was surprised to see this title, because I thought "holy cow, finally someone else appreciates low input latency" and then I realized it was my issue haha. By the way, wsltty 3.x also has excellent input latency now too. I've been using it for quite a while now with terminal Vim in WSL and it's about 90% as good as xterm on native Linux in terms of latency. wsltty also has no issues…
Thank you for providing the praise to the Windows Terminal team many of us know they deserve, allowing us to just click the thumbs-up response on GitHub.
I truly wish more modern software were capable of reaching this level of latency performance. I understand the response provided by "miniksa" at GitHub, but I don't feel satisfied by it. The maintainers of the frameworks that are described as adding so much latency should make a concerted effort to minimize that latency. We know from experience (see ASP.NET Core) that huge strides can be made in performance (both measured as throughput and latency) and that it is massively rewarding. It requires effort, but the payoffs are real.
I fear computer science is often encumbered by a corrosive culture of "good enough" with respect to performance. We have a lot of baggage and urban myths about performance, from maxims about optimization handed down from the first acolytes of computer science, to modern opinions about UX that over-emphasize simplicity, to a repertoire of clever psychological countermeasures for under-performance such as animation. It's a shame that more people don't appreciate how much more enjoyable computing is when latency is nearly zero.
Obviously orders of magnitude matter. The change from 1000ms to 100ms is more significant than a change from 100ms to 10ms. But we cannot diminish that latter change and we should not accept 100ms as good enough. Improving from 100ms to 10ms is still huge and some of us deeply appreciate it.
Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)
#89Author of the GitHub issue here. I was surprised to see this title, because I thought "holy cow, finally someone else appreciates low input latency" and then I realized it was my issue haha. By the way, wsltty 3.x also has excellent input latency now too. I've been using it for quite a while now with terminal Vim in WSL and it's about 90% as good as xterm on native Linux in terms of latency. wsltty also has no issues…
Can you post your computer specs? Because it's impossible for me to see any difference between the WSL terminal and Notepad. I can see a tiny difference compared with Electron apps, but I really need to concentrate to see it. My computer is no rocket, is a higher-end desktop from 6 years ago.
Mine is a ~6 year old i5 quad core desktop. A complete list of hardware can be found here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/the-tools-i-use#computer-desk...
If you can't notice it much, perhaps your monitor has really bad input lag and it's overtaking any difference between terminals. My monitor has very low input lag (about 13ms) but most monitors have 50-60ms or worse.
There's another comment in this thread where I go into more details about that and how it plays a big difference in being able to perceive input latency when typing.
Re: Typing inside of the default WSL terminal feels amazing (2018)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then there's also the input lag of your monitor too which is really important. A lot of monitors have really bad input lag, in the 50-60ms range and it's highly variable. This spec is also not usually listed by the manufacturer either and it's not the same thing as response time which is typically 1-10ms in most modern LCDs. Your monitor's input lag plays a very big role in how fast key presses are perceived because…
> Physical size doesn’t constitute how much you can fit on a monitor. For example my mom thinks that a 25” 1080p monitor is going to let her fit more things on her screen than a 22” 1080p monitor. Don’t be my mom! > The only thing that matters for “fitting more stuff on the screen” is the resolution of the monitor. This is only true under the assumption that your eyes have infinite resolution. In the more likely case…
It's not just eye resolution, its how the application is designed. An older WinForms application will have very compact ui and mad information density, but some modern web apps will dedicate an entire 1080p window to display 1 icon and two buttons.
I would say that combined with DPI scaling, his port provides a reasonable rule of thumb.