My first recommendation is to use a fast terminal with a bitmap font. The reason I say bitmap is because it will keep up with the display of a live capture.
In any reasonable terminal, bitmap shouldn’t be faster, because glyphs from vector fonts are rendered only once and cached into a glyph atlas in memory and then painted exactly like a bitmap. With Alacritty, that happens on the GPU :)
In any reasonable terminal, bitmap shouldn’t be faster, because glyphs from vector fonts are rendered only once and cached into a glyph atlas in memory and then painted exactly like a bitmap.
Nah. In bitmap fonts, a pixel is either set or not. Vector fonts tend to generate partially covered pixels that are handled by alpha blending, which is more expensive than the and+or you use to blit a hard-edged shape.
The trend to push everything onto the GPU is quite harmful especially for those of us not running mainstream OSen.
In any reasonable terminal, bitmap shouldn’t be faster, because glyphs from vector fonts are rendered only once and cached into a glyph atlas in memory and then painted exactly like a bitmap. With Alacritty, that happens on the GPU :)
Nah. In bitmap fonts, a pixel is either set or not. Vector fonts tend to generate partially covered pixels that are handled by alpha blending, which is more expensive than the and+or you use to blit a hard-edged shape.
The trend to push everything onto the GPU is quite harmful especially for those of us not running mainstream OSen.
You don’t have to do alpha blending every time, just cache the glyph together with the background color.
But do terminals actually do that? Background color can change any time at any cell.
I think that would be a silly way to spend memory.
Huh, I never thought of seeing how to get that data. That’s cool. I wrote a quick thing: https://github.com/jamesog/whatthemac