termbench VS kitty

"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.

And kitty is much faster according to this: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2701#issuecomment...

Also typometer based measurements also on Linux. Shrug.

kitty (Linux & Macos)

A terminal with built-in telemetry and a pricing model... Just what I never wanted!

To avoid being too negative, I'll offer the option of Kitty[1]. My current favorite terminal. Supports many features.

Including my personal favorites:

* ctrl+c (as opposed to stupid things like ctrl+shift+c) to copy data only when you have content selected. Otherwise, ctrl+c sends a sigint like normal.

* font ligature support (a controversial feature)

[1] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

The ncurses/xterm maintainer also had quite a lot of friction with the developer of the kitty terminal emulator.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/879

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`)

While researching how to fix the issue I found this GitHub issue with the fun number 606 (almost 666). First, I should say, that there is no easy solution. Shortly you have to specify for each shortcut mapping alternative with your keyboard layout. That means, for example, if your keyboard has Cyrillic "м" instead of Latin "v" then for making work CMD+V you should add also into configuration an additional line with "м".

I haven’t tried this yet (so please take my commentary with a grain of salt), but my initial thoughts are: (1) it looks interesting, (2) it looks overwhelming (there’s a lot going on in those screenshots), and (3) it’s likely slow (I might be completely wrong).

To elaborate a bit…

1. I love good design work and well-designed (UI-wise) software, and it certainly looks like the creators of Wave Terminal have made that a priority.

2. UX-wise, there’s just too much going on. As someone who lives in my terminal (with the exception of browsing the web, I do virtually everything in my terminal), it’s the single most important piece of software on my computer and it can never get in my way. I used the same terminal for many years and only switched to kitty [0] a couple years ago after testing it for months. In all of those years, every single terminal I tested managed to get in my way. Somehow, kitty manages to be packed full of features without ever—not even once—getting in my way, being slow, or freezing up on me.

3. Generally speaking, I think building on open web standards is a great thing and a plus. Unfortunately though, even in 2023, my experience has been that it’s really hard to build performant software meant to be run on native platforms using web technologies; the few who get this right—e.g., Figma—are anomalies and they generally invest an enormous amount of time and engineering capital into squeezing out as much performance as possible. As I explained in #2, for something as critical as my terminal, not being performant is simply not an option, so as much as I love the idea of building on open web standards, it actually scares me for software like this.

That said, I’m obviously judging before trying here, so I’ll make some time to test Wave Terminal.

[0]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty

to solve this I run Kitty with a tab bar on the bottom. this has tons of inspo: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/discussions/4447

Those existing tools are poorly designed, if you read the article it has a link to the discussion about its design choices, which contains in turn discussion about all the problems with sixel https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/33#issuecomment-2...