As someone who has not worked on this sort of thing: a wonderful article that shows that there are things you can do before having to shunt everything to the GPU.
I’m sure alacritty devs have considered it, but I wonder why they do not do damage tracking as well. Perhaps to keep the implementation simple?
Can someone explain why they use one of these performant terminal emulators? I’ve never in my life felt that my terminal was too slow at rendering almost anything, even with many years of Vim.
Is it just the tiny pleasure of that extra 15-30ms of latency?
I don’t use foot as my daily driver, but I have used it on systems that didn’t have GPU support working, and it was a lifesaver. Very handy to have in my toolbox.
(I usually use Alacritty, which is also performance focused, but I initially had some issues compiling it on my Pinebook Pro, for example.)
Do you find the experience of either dramatically different than the builtin terminal? I guess I just don’t notice much of a difference, or perhaps I just work on fairly powerful workstations?
Honestly part of why I standardized on Alacritty is it worked pretty consistently across macOS and Linux, I didn’t want to have something different on every machine. I get it configured the way I like it, and carry my config with me. The default terminal usually has something that annoys me about it.
I do notice a performance difference between Alacritty and other terminals, but I’m also someone who hates running a Python command line program instead of Rust or Zig in my terminal because I can feel those being a little slow too.
I think it’s annoying when I press the keyboard shortcut that opens a terminal, start typing, and find that it didn’t receive the first keypresses.
I just don’t think a computer should be slower than I am (and I am pretty slow). I work with keyboard only, and want to be able to rely on muscle memory, without having to pause until I see that the computer has caught up.
What have you run (and on what hardware) that was slow enough to exhibit that problem? I use urxvt on a decade-old desktop and it’s far too quick to start for me to be able to sneak any keystrokes in before it starts receiving them.
I use an older thinkpad, and plenty of programs don’t manage to start between two keystrokes, including terminals.
But I haven’t tried any in a while, and had not tried urxvt.
I can sneak in keystrokes with that, but I have to try. Seems good enough for my regular slow speed.
But instead it fails to render some basic things, including emoji. Maybe I need rxvt-unicode-truecolor-wide-glyphs or another variant for that. (I use monochrome emoji but they still don’t work.)
There’s a huge gap between desktop environment terminal emulators and KISS emulators.
In my testing urxvt is not as fast as foot, alacritty or kitty, but it is quite OK.
I use it, mostly because I need some terminal, it’s available and easy to customize. I’d say the tiny pleasure is a very nice added bonus. Foot with mksh literally opens instantly and that does feel nice when you live in the terminal.
As someone who has not worked on this sort of thing: a wonderful article that shows that there are things you can do before having to shunt everything to the GPU.
I’m sure alacritty devs have considered it, but I wonder why they do not do damage tracking as well. Perhaps to keep the implementation simple?
It seems that they also do some kind of damage tracking, tbh I am not quite sure what the difference is: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/pull/5773
Note that this was merged 2 years ago, while the wiki article on foot’s codeberg page 4 years old.
Can someone explain why they use one of these performant terminal emulators? I’ve never in my life felt that my terminal was too slow at rendering almost anything, even with many years of Vim.
Is it just the tiny pleasure of that extra 15-30ms of latency?
I don’t use foot as my daily driver, but I have used it on systems that didn’t have GPU support working, and it was a lifesaver. Very handy to have in my toolbox.
(I usually use Alacritty, which is also performance focused, but I initially had some issues compiling it on my Pinebook Pro, for example.)
Do you find the experience of either dramatically different than the builtin terminal? I guess I just don’t notice much of a difference, or perhaps I just work on fairly powerful workstations?
Honestly part of why I standardized on Alacritty is it worked pretty consistently across macOS and Linux, I didn’t want to have something different on every machine. I get it configured the way I like it, and carry my config with me. The default terminal usually has something that annoys me about it.
I do notice a performance difference between Alacritty and other terminals, but I’m also someone who hates running a Python command line program instead of Rust or Zig in my terminal because I can feel those being a little slow too.
I think it’s annoying when I press the keyboard shortcut that opens a terminal, start typing, and find that it didn’t receive the first keypresses.
I just don’t think a computer should be slower than I am (and I am pretty slow). I work with keyboard only, and want to be able to rely on muscle memory, without having to pause until I see that the computer has caught up.
What have you run (and on what hardware) that was slow enough to exhibit that problem? I use urxvt on a decade-old desktop and it’s far too quick to start for me to be able to sneak any keystrokes in before it starts receiving them.
I use an older thinkpad, and plenty of programs don’t manage to start between two keystrokes, including terminals.
But I haven’t tried any in a while, and had not tried urxvt.
I can sneak in keystrokes with that, but I have to try. Seems good enough for my regular slow speed.
But instead it fails to render some basic things, including emoji. Maybe I need
rxvt-unicode-truecolor-wide-glyphsor another variant for that. (I use monochrome emoji but they still don’t work.)There’s a huge gap between desktop environment terminal emulators and KISS emulators. In my testing urxvt is not as fast as foot, alacritty or kitty, but it is quite OK.
I use it, mostly because I need some terminal, it’s available and easy to customize. I’d say the tiny pleasure is a very nice added bonus. Foot with mksh literally opens instantly and that does feel nice when you live in the terminal.