Linux Terminal Emulators Have The Potential Of Being Much Faster

[Mez']

Gnome terminal's problem isn't speed. It's lack of features. It's as barebone as Windows Terminal or CMD.exe. Konsole/Yakuake blows it away. One of the reasons I uninstall gnome and replace with KDE on each occasion I get new laptop at work. It's barebones to the point of being useless (I do software development).
But, hey, speed improvements are always nice, if code is maintained.

You summed up Gnome philosophy of late and what I've been saying.
1. Gnome apps can't fulfill the use case they were designed for anymore.
You can barely manage files with Nautilus.
You can barely edit text files with their new app.
You can barely make use of a terminal with their new console crap.

2. When they get empty shells, like Chrome/Chromium is, they will tell you loading the app or the file/page you're looking for is blazing fast.
It's like Nascar racing, you're going to be fast, but it has no actual real life applications, and Nascar cars are useless for real life. Hence, for what users expect of a DE. But hey, they're blazing fast... at doing nothing.

[brent]

Improvements to VTE seems like a good step since it's pretty popular. There are a bunch of terminal emulators that use it and some software also uses it for embedded terminals.

[skierpage]

Such gigachad move.

-makes fastest terminal ever
-doesn't develop further

It helps to RTF Twitter thread before spouting off. "I just made a bunch of VTE patches because it's good enough" TIL VTE is Gnome's VTE Terminal Widget Library, used by Gnome Terminal. Some of Hergert's patches are now in the main branch. #win!

All the other lazy moronic posters whining "pointless", "such a load of bullcrap", "what's even the point of such sh*tposting" when this guy is putting his improvements in a support library that will benefit Gnome's standard terminal should be ashamed. READ THE ORIGINAL MATERIAL BEFORE SPOUTING OFF, don't assume the Phoronix summary captures all the nuance.

"Oh but he ought to make the source available". The insulting content-free responses here shows why developers choose not to; later on Twitter:

I honestly don't have the patience to share it. People will just try to nerd snipe me and I already have more projects than I can maintain in GNOME.

Why not put that effort to make a universal terminal emulator library that doesn't suck, used by major DEs/WMs, tooolkit agnostic

This VTE library is probably pretty Gnome-specific. But demanding a developer who's figured out some ways to make a faster terminal emulator should not upstream improvements that will benefit his DE and instead develop a new foundation library to rule them all starting with zero users is a classic case of xkcd 927: Standards.

Not sure if performance really matters past a certain point for terminals.

Also from the Twitter thread,

Xterm is so slow it will literally slow down your build times if you have enough output. Always been that way. In my case, I'm interested in reducing both energy waste and display latency.

[reavertm]

Gnome terminal's problem isn't speed. It's lack of features. It's as barebone as Windows Terminal or CMD.exe. Konsole/Yakuake blows it away. One of the reasons I uninstall gnome and replace with KDE on each occasion I get new laptop at work. It's barebones to the point of being useless (I do software development).
But, hey, speed improvements are always nice, if code is maintained.

[reba]

It looks like your test is likely pixel size dependent, I'm at 3840x2160 @ 2x scaling.

After super+right, console was about 16 seconds here. With my VTE patches (which only update drawing mechanisms currently, not yet fps/throughput/latency) it drops to:

time mpv -vo=tct -profile=sw-fast -no-config -length="0:30" -hwdec=no -framedrop=no -untimed -no-audio ~/Downloads/big_buck_bunny_720p_10mb.mp4
(+) Video --vid=1 (*) (h264 1280x720 25.000fps)
Audio --aid=1 (*) (aac 6ch 48000Hz)

real 0m5.087s
user 0m10.218s
sys 0m0.550s

That looks much better. My second test (the one you quoted) was a find /, so obviously system dependant.
Looking forward for news and/or a later comeback to this topic.
Did you compare with foot on your system?

[mirmirmir]

Definitely. They can do whatever they want. Bury their head in the sand to any user with common sense telling what they'd like from their workflow. They just have the marketing machine to pay off some influencers. They succeed in making a silk's purse out of a sow's ear to easily impressionable people. That's what they do best, and that's how they make their weakly designed apps the de facto.
If you just look at Phoronix or one rando web blog I have in mind, Red Hat has an army of paid influencers, even the more now with IBM backing them up. That's what they do best, kill off better designed stuff through heavy influencing everywhere, making believe in that fake sense of community (when most of their projects is 70% contribution from their own employees) and blaming others when they openly and honestly do the same.

Ikr, linux influencer is really profitable job, am I right Michael ? He's pretty much set for life thanks to IBM.

[Mez']

Such load of bullcrap can come only from gnome "developer". serious people would never allow themselves something like that

Definitely. They can do whatever they want. Bury their head in the sand to any user with common sense telling what they'd like from their workflow. They just have the marketing machine to pay off some influencers. They succeed in making a silk's purse out of a sow's ear to easily impressionable people. That's what they do best, and that's how they make their weakly designed apps the de facto.
If you just look at Phoronix or one rando web blog I have in mind, Red Hat has an army of paid influencers, even the more now with IBM backing them up. That's what they do best, kill off better designed stuff through heavy influencing everywhere, making believe in that fake sense of community (when most of their projects is 70% contribution from their own employees) and blaming others when they openly and honestly do the same.

[Mez']

What's with the 5 different window decorations on that screenshot? Ah, I know. It's the GNOME CSD and Wayland that make your desktop look like shit.

Or just adwaita. It's one of the most inconsistent themes I've ever seen. And arguably it looks like it's made from a teenager in his garage. I mean, if you're gonna force everyone to use it, at least make something that is not entirely ugly.
Of course, the waste of space of CSDs doesn't help to make it look good, but generally speaking, every non indoctrinated person will try any possible hack to have a decent theme supersede the shit we see.

[Markospox]

When will someone write a beginnal, it doesn't have to be for beginners?

[timofonic]

This is literally what I'm doing and why I didn't want to release the code to just fragment things further. I just wanted to know the upper bound for my work on VTE.

It's okay. Who are you? The TermKit I know comes from Miguel de Icaza.

I'm no biased towards GTK, Qt, FLTK or whatever. I see them as a way of vendor lock-in, anyway.

VTE is GTK dependent. Konsole uses it's own Qt stuff too. ITerm2 has it's own Mac stuff. Kitty is a mix of C and Python. Other terminal emulators implement their own terminal stuff too or use Toolkit dependent stuff.

Despite it's shortcomings, I found projects that have an approach that I think it's better for everyone: libtsm, libtmt, libvterm (used by NeoVim), libnast (only used by nast, st fork), mterm:
- Toolkit agnostic.
- Platform independent.
- Extremely portable.

But all those lack documentation, not full featured, not strongly maintained and not enough optimized.

It would be amazing if independent code be used across many other implementations and being toolkit agnostic, instead each one implementing their own terminal stuff. KDE, GNome, XFCE, Windows, Mac, Enlightenment and whatever.