- cross-posted to:
- gnome@discuss.tchncs.de
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We need to stop this usage of proprietary MS GitHub + Discord in free software. It completely undermines the philosophy.
What is the deal with getting gpu acceleration into a terminal emulator of all things? Of all the innovations that we could use, faster drawing of text doesn’t feel like it should be a priority.
GPU rendered text interfaces are pretty ubiquitous already. You can find that in IDEs, browsers, apps and GUIs of OSs. Drawing pixels is still a job the GPU excels at. No matter whether it’s just text. So I don’t see a point why we shouldn’t apply that to terminal emulators as well.
ok but such a sensational announcement like this suggests that before (and without) gpu acceleration the program was noticeably slow for some reason
It’s not just about speed, but also (battery) efficiency.
Even if you don’t notice the speed, if you are working on anything but a modern expensive laptop, you will notice the difference in battery draw between:
VS Code > NeoVim in traditional terminal > Neovim in Alacritty or Ghostty
Have you ever been in a terminal, or VSCode, and started tailing a super-fast log, and control-C takes forever to stop it while a CPU core goes crazy?
Text rendering isn’t efficient, and GPUs help.
Scrolling through a large text with colours and higher unicode characters (tailing a log with colour coding, for instance) can be a bit slow with Gnome’s terminal in my experience. In Alacritty (and on a machine with a GPU) it’s not.
text is like the slowest thing to draw :P when debugging games, a running log can make the 3D rendering stutter significantly.
My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I’m not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.
I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.
We are reaching autistic levels never seen before
I’m not against it, but another factor that we should check in a terminal emulator (as a tool where you run everything from) is the system requirements.
I’m using urxvt and that’s so easy on the system, it starts instantly. I can open multiple instances without worrying about the system resources.
I believe it uses X.org’s text rendering. X.org uses OpenGL under the hood. It’s not CPU rendered.
Alacrity felt bulkier when I tried. I will try this too though.
Alacritty felt too slow and was missing settings I wanted (like mousewheel scroll) due to devs being opinionated. Kitty has been fast and flexible for me.
Finally a gpu accelerated Terminal emulator with tabbing.
Kitty has tabs
ohhh, I didnt know that thanks but Ghostty has Zero config by default which i like (Edit: maybe I might use wezterm)
Alacritty has windows and tabs.
Idk how to activate it (And my distro Cachyos uses a custom alacrity config
Unless it is trying to actually look cool like “cool retro terminal” or something, I fail to see how the point. I don’t recall ever in the history of my terminal use ever thinking “man, this terminal emulator is so slow!” I mean, really… 120fps 4k terminals. Neat I guess?
That’s not what GPU acceleration is used for.
This. If you hadn’t written it …
What would be the best foss for Android ?
Do you mean best FOSS terminal for Android? To my knowledge, there’s only really Termux.