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Comment by stuckagain | Hacker News Reader

Seriously. ^^^

How fast is it? I haven't had a terminal that was as fast as xterm with a matrox millenium ii. That was 20 years ago which is pretty sad. Of course the terminals look better these days.

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From what I remember, and I'm possibly wrong with this, the Matrox Millenium cards were the last generation where 2D performance was a design focus - the Matrox RAMDAC was the best there was at the time. After the Voodoo 3 was released (IIRC the first combined 2D+3D accelerated video card) the 3D arms race started, but 2D performance hasn't moved a lot since then (at least in consumer-level hardware), hence the move to software being written in OpenGL etc. to benefit from hardware 3D acceleration.

I'm guessing that "workstation" cards (designed for CAD etc.) may have moved on a bit since then, though.

On my laptop this terminal is not very fast. A cached 'find /' runs in 11 seconds on an xterm, 17 seconds on maximized alacrity when it's on screen, 25 seconds on alacritty if it's off-screen, and 44 seconds on a 80x24 alacritty.

I don't know why it's slower when you make the window smaller, or when it's not being displayed. I expect the answer is "some kind of OpenGL bullshit" but beyond that...

gnome-terminal takes about 5 minutes to do this, but it has unlimited scrollback and as far as I can see alacritty has no scrollback whatsoever.

yah, 9600 baud is as fast as I need my terminal to go. 19.2K is just crazy.

That's not what I said. What I said was that terminal was unbelievably fast. Especially for backwards scrolling which is an important use case to me.

I was just having a little joke, apologies if it came off as a criticism. It seems very strange to me that people are still talking about speeds of terminals, but not my field (any more) fortunately.

One of the first things I wrote was a terminal emulator using telnet to run on PC-DOS using a port of curses to connect to our Sun 3's. To think in 2017 people are still concerned about terminals is very surprising to me.

The problem is the terminals have been getting monotonically slower over the last 20 years, whereas the amount of build spew I need to grope around in to find the relevant error has not decreased :-/

yeah, I use ide's (Xcode/Appcode/VS/Delphi) for all my work so not really an issue. I can see if you're stuck with command line compilers though it would be annoying. I would hate to go back to make files and command lines ugh!

So you are missing a wonderful world of powerful tools because you not like terminals.

I would argue the reverse :-). I've used terminals in the past, had the beauty that is screen, even gave courses on vi. When bitmapped screens became available it was ide's for me.

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