termbench VS alacritty

"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.

It's opinionated, which comes with upsides and downsides. I won't blame the maintainer to keep things focused, feature creep (even for worthy features) can kill a FOSS project.

Another example is sixel support, there's a fork where it all works but is not sufficiently "proven" (code quality just as well as sixel being the best fit for the problem)

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/pull/4763#issuecommen...

It may be annoying but I get the reasoning, and there are other terminals.

alacritty (Linux, Macos & Windows)

> Ligatures: ok, nice, possible in terms too (hopefully Alacritty one day)

I wouldn't hold my breath. Seems like its getting the iPad calculator treatment[0]. Which is to say rather than ship something working that can be improved, they're leaving a UX void.

[0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50

IME, this is like the golden age of terminal apps in general and macOS-compatible ones in particular. There are several really good terminals for macOS:

[iTerm2 app](https://iterm2.com/)

[Kitty terminal](https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/)

[WezTerm terminal](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/index.html)

[Alacritty](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty)

My daily driver is WezTerm…

- Runs on Linux, macOS, Windows 10 and FreeBSD

- [Multiplex terminal panes, tabs and windows on local and remote hosts, with native mouse and scrollback](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html)

- [Ligatures](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#fira-code-monospaced-font...), Color Emoji and font fallback, with true color and [dynamic color schemes](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/appearance.html#colors).

- [Hyperlinks](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/hyperlinks.html)

- [Searchable Scrollback](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/scrollback.html) (use mouse wheel and `Shift-PageUp` and `Shift PageDown` to navigate, Ctrl-Shift-F to activate search mode)

- xterm style selection of text with mouse; paste selection via `Shift-Insert` (bracketed paste is supported!)

- SGR style mouse reporting (works in vim and tmux)

- Render underline, double-underline, italic, bold, strikethrough (most other terminal emulators do not support as many render attributes)

- Configuration via a [configuration file](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/files.html) with hot reloading

- Multiple Windows (Hotkey: `Super-N`)

- Splits/Panes (Split horizontally/vertically: `Ctrl-Shift-Alt-%` and `Ctrl-Shift-Alt-"`, move between panes: `Ctrl-Shift-ArrowKey`)

- Tabs (Hotkey: `Super-T`, next/prev: `Super-Shift-[` and `Super-Shift-]`, go-to: `Super-[1-9]`)

- [SSH client with native tabs](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/ssh.html)

- [Connect to serial ports for embedded/Arduino work](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/serial.html)

- Connect to a local multiplexer server over unix domain sockets

- Connect to a remote multiplexer using SSH or TLS over TCP/IP

- iTerm2 compatible image protocol support, and built-in [imgcat command](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/imgcat.html)

- Kitty graphics support

- Sixel graphics support (experimental: starting in `20200620-160318-e00b076c`)

# We use Alacritty's default Linux config directory as our storage location here. mkdir -p ~/.config/alacritty/themes git clone https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty-theme ~/.config/alacritty/themes

if by 'in the terminal' you mean 'in a program emulating an ascii terminal' then no, because ascii terminals don't support anything that looks better than ascii art. they don't support sixel either. there are a variety of proposals for how to add graphics to ascii terminal emulators in a backwards-compatible way, such as mgr and notty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/51

but the 'terminal' that a terminal emulator is emulating is a device which provides a user access to a remote computer. normally nowadays this is a laptop or cellphone. in that case, yes, you can use x-windows, xpra, vnc, or a web browser

A decent terminal application (i.e: iterm2, alacritty, etc.)

I have been having random input lags with Alacritty. Initially I thought it was my custom neovim config. After some investigation, I have found an Alacritty github issue where users are reporting the same issue: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6844

Thank you for your suggestions. I have now narrow it down to my terminal emulator. Alacritty. More precisely this issue: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6844