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Comment by mikejmoffitt | Hacker News Reader

Is there still no way to make iTerm2 refresh faster? When doing quick scrolling or output, it's so noticeably choppy compared to Terminal.app, or even Xterm.

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Terminal dispensed with NSScrollView and I think that won a performance advantage in rendering. It's hard to do if you're not Apple. They also modulate the refresh rate based on load, which 3.1 adds. They're using Core Text which is very slow compared to Core Graphics but they made it up with clever hacks.

I don't buy it as the main problem. 60fps is not asking for very much from a terminal emulator. VGA text modes can handle it, my old 486DX laptop can handle it, and XTerm can handle it (even fully software rendering everything to a buffer). It's possible core text is to blame, but this seems like an odd problem for an emulator to have in 2017.

This bothers me, too. Terminal lacks some features I really want, but it's implementation just feels polished. It's just so smooth, reflows text nicely and renders fonts perfectly.

Terminal is great but a major lacking feature is 'true color' (https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728).

If you an Apple engineer working on Terminal and reading this post, please add it, it would be much appreciated :)

And here I thought I was spoiled with 256 colors in Terminal.

Do you use any advanced features like triggers/alerts with captured output?

I found that a regex I was using to pop a notif was slowing iTerm2 down big time, removed it, and it feels much better now.

Zero. I use iTerm2 when I have to use a Mac, where I act as though it's Xterm. This is just out of the box behavior. Older versions had an adjustable refresh rate slider.

Triggers were super slow in 2.x but are much faster in 3.0. Try it again if it's been a while.

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