Meet Ghostty 1.0: The GPU-accelerated terminal emulator exits beta after two years, challenging Kitty and Alacritty with its speed and features.
      • maxprime ( maxprime@lemmy.ml ) 
        11·
        2 years ago

        Thanks for the info. Sincerely did not know.

        Since the mods deleted my post, I’ll repeat what I wrote, because aside from the unintentional racism, I feel like I made some valid points.

        GPU accelerated terminal emulators are already quite popular and if you use alacrity, kitty, or wez, then you already use them. They can help with not only cool effects like smooth scrolling and transparency, but also with massive text files. Handling an 8gb text file is complicated, and using a GPU can help with that.

        Ghostty’s selling points are not just the GPU acceleration, since that’s actually fairly standard nowadays. They are: (from their about page)

        Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.

        I for one am very excited for this terminal and can’t wait to see what kind of development comes out of it!

      • Zucca ( Zucca@sopuli.xyz ) English
        3·
        2 years ago

        TIL, I need to avoid using that phrase.

        But I still don’t know what it actually means. Wikipedia gave me the food, place names and acronyms. 🤷 I’ll keep digging.

        EDIT: Maybe we should use “tune out” instead?

        EDIT2: Found your other post with the link.

  • Daniel Quinn ( danielquinn@lemmy.ca ) English
    15·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Zacryon ( Zacryon@feddit.org ) 
      45·
      2 years ago

      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.

        • F04118F ( F04118F@feddit.nl ) 
          17·
          2 years ago

          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

        • fmstrat ( fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ) English
          5·
          2 years ago

          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.

        • The Ramen Dutchman ( lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network ) 
          1·
          2 years ago

          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.

    • lime! ( lime@feddit.nu ) English
      15·
      2 years ago

      text is like the slowest thing to draw :P when debugging games, a running log can make the 3D rendering stutter significantly.

    • GenderNeutralBro ( GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • fxdave ( fxdave@lemmy.ml ) 
    8·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • zod000 ( zod000@lemmy.ml ) 
    7·
    2 years ago

    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?