refterm VS termbench

refterm, a terminal emulator proof of concept.

> licensing it so that they couldn’t even look at it

https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm/blob/main/LICENSE

It’s just GPL 2.0, what are you talking about!?

Are Microsoft employees vampires that will burn up instantly if they merely glance at GPL code or something?

This is sour grapes nonsense from Microsoft. “We don’t like your tone so we won’t even dignify your argument by considering it.”

At one point an MS employee said they would love to fix their code as suggested by Casey but he refused to even look at the YouTube video!

“I would love to hear your arguments but I refuse to listen to the sound of your voice.” is next-level dismissive.

You might also find https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm interesting.

Casey Muratori made a renderer/terminal a short while back. Might be a good reference of you intend to go that route. https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

You keep complaining that it's not a fully working terminal. Casey, on the other hand, writes here: [1]

> These features are not designed to be comprehensive, since this is only meant to be a reference renderer, not a complete terminal.

[1] https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm#feature-support

After that post they did implement a full reference implementation:

https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm/commits/main

And there is movement in getting changes into the terminal itself:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10461

For a basic example of why you would want GPU acceleration, have a look at refterm: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

Even processes that you wouldn't think would be impacted by a terminal can be hurt relaly bad by your terminal's performance: your compiler's logs, etc. The GPU rendering part merely guarantees that your terminal sticks at 60FPS (or, whatever your refresh rate is) if the processing behind is efficient.

"Seems smooth to me" is a thing people constantly say, at this point I just assume everyone's blind to lag. I'll wait for the benchmarks.

> (4) Casey sits down and writes termbench, to illustrate his point (https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench); it is indeed orders of magnitude faster than Windows Terminal, and proves his point decisively.

This is actually pretty interesting. Is there something similar specifically for linux?

I just ran a quick test using Casey Muratori's termbench (https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench) you are an order of magnitude slower than Alacritty, and also significantly slower than iTerm. Warp also locks up pretty severely and only shows a new frame once every few seconds during most of the run.

Alacritty

> Am I the only one who really enjoys Windows 11 so far?

Probably not, but consider that people have a lot of different use cases for their computer and a lot of different priorities and Microsoft has been pretty consistent lately about ignoring pretty much any of them that aren't "I really wish my desktop were a clunky tablet".

> I really like the new UI which feels more modern and harmonic

Subjective, but feeling more modern is precisely the opposite of what I want in a UI. Modern means slow and cumbersome with lots of wasted space, sparse options, and unreadable widgets.

> Control Panel is still in there somewhere but why should I care?

Control Panel had nothing wrong with it and probably still has settings options that are missing from the new ones?

> new GPU accelerated Terminal is really nice

It's performance is remarkably terrible for something that's GPU accelerated. Casey Muratori has said a lot about it. https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench and https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm were a result. It doesn't mean a lot in terms of quality of Windows 11, I just think it is a good illustration of modern Windows team's development practices.

> Does it have tons of telemetry, cruft from 20 years in the kernel and some rough edges?

Cruft is fine because it is there for backwards compat, which is huge for a tone of desktop use cases. Linux Kernel has a ton of cruft too for the same reason. Telemetry is bullshit and wastes my computer's resources to effectively spy on me.

> Is the hardware requirements a bit ridiculous?

The hardware requirements are very ridiculous. Windows 11 is not revolutionary, but somehow manages to require twice the minimum specs of ten in some metrics, and a TPM module.

> To each their own I guess but it sometimes feels a bit depressing how HN crowd trashes every OS.

They all have problems, big problems, so they all deserve it. I find it more remarkable that people consistently try to say that everything is actually ok!

> Is everyone here still using C64, Windows 2000 or OS9 because it „was the last good system“?

God I wish they were still viable.

Not just Windows. While this is specifically about Windows, you can view this as at least a baseline for terminals: thousands of fps are within reach. If you're barely reaching a few dozen, or less, you're doing something wrong.

See also his benchmark for terminals: https://github.com/cmuratori/termbench

When looking into the issue further, he made a benchmark for the terminal: termbench. On the issue he made, him and a couple others found that the Windows Terminal was spending a large amount of time parsing VT codes. A fair bit of this bottleneck was due to std::string and std::vector resizing.