Linux Terminal Emulators Have The Potential Of Being Much Faster

Prominent GNOME developer Christian Hergert announced he created a new terminal emulator that is twice as fast as the closest GPU-based renderer he's found yet so far on Linux, which was Alacritty. Unfortunately though he currently doesn't have any plans to develop this experimental speedy terminal emulator any further.

Hergert, who is known for his work on GNOME Builder and Sysprof and other GNOME contributions through his employment at Red Hat, tweeted on Friday:

"Just going to put it out there because I don't intend to do anything with it, but I have created a terminal emulator that is twice as fast as the closest GPU-based renderer I've found (at least on Linux) which was Alacritty."

And the obligatory screenshot of his experimental terminal emulator running a basic performance test alongside Alacritty:

He added part of the reason he was able to make it so far was due to his knowledge from writing a large part of the GTK renderer code and the profiler to guide how to spend the time optimizing the code. And also adding:

"Instead of continuing Termkit though, I just made a bunch of VTE patches because it's good enough. Console includes those patches here...And yes it updates at frame rate without dropping frames because it only processes what is visible when rendering the next frame. I also found it interesting how the field of contenders all use multiple threads and some even attempt to balance between CPU and scroll performance. Termkit used a single thread, and did both with less resources."

As for not developing it further, Hergert tweeted:

"I don't care too much because creating your own terminal is like 20 lines of code these days. People who really care can just create one as easy as configuring an existing one."