Hacker News Reader

Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

After trying out alacritty[1] and seeing just how good gpu-accelerated terminal could be I’ve been eagerly awaiting an update like this from iterm.

I really wish iterm was cross platform. I’ve realized when switching between Mac and Linux how important the terminal is to my development and quality of life.

1. https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

View on HN

I would recommend kitty[1] as well, it certainly has more features than alacritty, like opening links via keyboard using hints.

1. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty

Just had a look at their docs:

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/remote-control.html

Cool, it even works over SSH! Wait, what? This lets a remote server take over your workstation.

...so don't enable that feature? It's off by default AFAICT.

if you're able to get an ssh tunnel going to the machine...i think you already have control over the server

This optional feature is the other way around. When you turn it on, the connect to a remote servers, that remote server can run commands on your local box.

I recommend Cool Retro Term. No tabs. Not a lot of features. Emulation can be a little strange. But it's cross-platform and a metric ass ton of fun.

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

And if you push the settings right, you can use it to convince the procurement department that you need a new monitor.

Cool Retro Term is based on konsole, so it's actually a solid terminal emulater... and like you pointed out... loads of fun.

I actually like alacritty, but surprisingly latency is still much higher than on xterm or eshell. These are relatively slow rendering massive amounts of text (eshell much slower than xterm, and lacking many features).

However, the feature I price the most is quick responsiveness when I type. For that, I still find xterm extremely good.

I am surprised to see nobody has posted a link to Dan Luu's article about benchmarking terminal emulator latency:

https://danluu.com/term-latency/

For me, one of the takeaways from this is that time taken to cat a large file is a poor benchmark of a terminal emulator.

This article also includes a nice demonstration of yet another application of Rust - as an easily reproducible and highly reliable way to load your machine so hard it interferes with your terminal.

Any low-level language can do that.

Any idea how it affects battery usage on a laptop with an integrated GPU?

iTerm actually disables the Metal rederer while on battery by default.

I think that was the point of their question. While it's disabled by default, if it goes from 12h life to 6h, people will leave disabled. If it goes from 12h to 11.5h, people maybe would consider flipping that toggle.

Kind of counter intuitive. Wouldn’t the GPU be more efficient at rendering graphics than the CPU? For laptop models with dedicated GPU just use the integrated one on battery but ALWAYS prefer Metal GPU rendering to software.

I’m guessing here but given the target of macOS this is done to prevent the GPU from being used. Many apps on macOS can do their drawing on the CPU or via the onboard Intel graphics. Metal presumably would force the GPU on, which would impact battery life.

Except that is not how it works. Metal absolutely works with the integrated GPU.

He wasn't saying metal can render via the cpu, he was saying that macos apps in general can choose whether to use cpu or gpu rendering.

No, it's not. Each visible pane gets its own thread, and three frames are pipelined. That means you could easily keep two cores plus your GPU going full steam (provided you have an underpowered GPU, which you almost certainly do, because you have a mac). In the legacy renderer, everything happened on the main thread so the most power it could draw was one core at 100%.

> In the legacy renderer, everything happened on the main thread so the most power it could draw was one core at 100%.

We’re not talking about wattage, but energy consumption. I.e. a single core working at its max for 5 seconds uses more power than three cores working for one second. It’s a question of efficiency, not how many cores are working at once.

Has the bug been fixed where it doesn't disable? I had to track down why my Nvidia GPU was being used all the time and killing my battery. Turns out it's iTerm2 and it isn't disabling the renderer correctly.

"gpu-accelerated cross platform" is not that hard as it sounds.

Here is an example of GPU rendering with support of Acrylic(Windows) / Vibrancy (MacOS) so popular in terminal implementations: https://sciter.com/sciter-4-2-support-of-acrylic-theming/

Your link is about html themes? What does it have to do with cross platform, GPU accelerated drawing?

Sciter is an HTML rendering engine. It has to do its drawing somehow, and apparently it uses GPU acceleration across platforms.

alacritty is meant to be fast, but it isn’t even close yet. The last time I checked there were multiple issues open about it being in reality slower than even terminal.app

Reply on news.ycombinator.com