More Optimizations Made For Making GNOME/VTE Terminals Go Faster

Back in September GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted how Linux terminal emulators have the potential of being much faster based on his experiments. While at the time he didn't plan to pursue it further, in the weeks since he's been making enhancements to GNOME's VTE code that is used by GNOME Console and other apps.

The past several weeks has seen Christian Hergert making performance improvements to VTE for this virtual terminal library used by GTK applications. This week he landed some more improvements.

As outlined in This Week In GNOME, there's been more happenings around faster terminals. The VTE scrollback buffer is now compressed using LZ4 rather than Zlib for better performance, there are performance improvements around bidirectional text, compilers can now more effectively inline important code paths, a new drawing abstraction was added, faster stylized line drawing, and GTK can now automatically calculate damage regions with VTE using native render nodes.

Hergert ended this week's VTE status update with:

"I still expect more work to be done around frame scheduling so that we can remove the ~40fps cap that predates reliable access to vblank information."

Great seeing all the ongoing GNOME/VTE work for faster terminal emulators.