Linux Terminal Emulators Have The Potential Of Being Much Faster

[billyswong]

For terminal or terminal emulator, the "speed" we care is will it slow down verbose programs, not will it get smooth 60fps...

[Quackdoc]

For terminal or terminal emulator, the "speed" we care is will it slow down verbose programs, not will it get smooth 60fps...

speak for yourself, mpv vo=tct go brrrr

[Hohlraum]

Console is such a POS. For some reason it gets janky with full screen + multi-monitor. Alacritty, no tab support. Foot, no Wayland support (or if does, doesn't support scaling). The prospects are underwhelming.

[reba]

Comparing terminal performance/speed without adding foot (git) (arch) to the mix is disqualifying from the start.

It's probably the quickest redrawing and most responsive terminal I ever tested (and those were quite many with the usual suspects as alacritty, kitty, etc.).



foot is also the fastest to open when called, which is important to me as I like my systems extremely responsive:

$ time foot -e /bin/echo 42
real    0m0,030s
user    0m0,026s
sys     0m0,013s​

Even faster when used in daemon mode:

$ time footclient -e /bin/echo 42
real    0m0,007s
user    0m0,001s
sys     0m0,000s​

That's 7 milliseconds to spawn a new terminal window, echo and exit.


For comparison alacritty:

$ time alacritty -e /bin/echo 42
real    0m0,145s
user    0m0,096s
sys     0m0,061s​

kitty:

$ time kitty -e /bin/echo 42
real    0m0,852s
user    0m0,941s
sys     0m0,109s​

KDE Konsole:

$ time konsole -e /bin/echo 42
real    0m0,217s
user    0m0,135s
sys     0m0,064s​

[reba]

Foot, no Wayland support (or if does, doesn't support scaling). The prospects are underwhelming.

foot is wayland native. README.md

[kpedersen]

So if you're happy with basic features then yeah you can go a lot faster than most terminal emulators.

For people who have been using the terminal for a while and are experienced enough to only require "basic" features; one hint is to use TERM=ansi. From this you can disable a lot of the tacky "aesthetic beginner" stuff in programs.

Also, if you haven't already tried it; give a bitmap font a shot. Not needing anti-aliasing is easier on the eyes, renders faster (even without a GPU) and just looks better in general. One that I find very effective is Spleen. Sidestepping anti-aliasing makes the whole experience quite different. Fast, crisp and "modern".

[RussianNeuroMancer]

I just hope this one get fixed one day

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/console/-/issues/93

[Quackdoc]

Comparing terminal performance/speed without adding foot (git) (arch) to the mix is disqualifying from the start.

It's probably the quickest redrawing and most responsive terminal I ever tested (and those were quite many with the usual suspects as alacritty, kitty, etc.).
...

a fun test would be to run mpv vo=tct since it does get limited by console often something like below would work

time mpv -vo=tct -profile=sw-fast -no-config -length="0:30" -hwdec=no -framedrop=no -untimed -no-audio video.mkv

[Hohlraum]

foot is wayland native. README.md

Then it just doesn't properly support scaling because I get the giant cursor over the window like I do with other programs that don't support it property. Probably some goofy Gnome specific thing. I found kitty which supports everything I need with some tinkering.

[reba]

Then it just doesn't properly support scaling because I get the giant cursor over the window like I do with other programs that don't support it property. Probably some goofy Gnome specific thing. I found kitty which supports everything I need with some tinkering.

Maybe. On KDE and labwc is works perfectly well. I have no experience with Gnome.

Kitty and KDE Konsole support ligatures, merging for example "-" and ">" into a single drawn arrow.
foot does not but it's not strictly necessary for me; although in Sublime and IntelliJ IDEA is appreciate this.