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Comment by christoph-heiss | Hacker News Reader

Another GPU-accelerated terminal emulator is alacritty[0].

Although it has a lot less features than kitty and really is only usable with tmux (or GNU screen, whatever), it is more or less perfect for people who want their terminal to do just one thing and that one thing pretty fast.

Disclaimer: Haven't tried kitty yet and using alacritty for a nearly a year now.

[0] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

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I was pretty impressed when I found alacritty a while ago, but I stopped using it as I soon found out that pretty much any speed gain I got from using the terminal is pretty much negated from having to use tmux in order to have any form of window management..

Could you please provide more details on the speed issues with tmux?

It's, well, slow. Haven't done any measurements, but it's noticeable. To do its work tmux must be basically another terminal emulator, and it seems it isn't the fastest at it. It's still strange, neither a little context switching (tmux is an extra process in the pipeline) nor doing the terminal things should amount to more than a millisecond. I think.

I haven't had any speed issues with tmux. Maybe you have something in your config that's slowing it down?

Different people have different sensitivities. I also don't want to use Gnome Terminal or most other terminals for that matter, because of latency. I also find Windows Cmd window slow. Never done any measurement, but xterm feels right.

It's extremely noticeable in certain situations on MacOS.

Use a full screen terminal with a 12pt font on a 4K display. Split the tmux window into quarters and pull up some logs in each pane. Now use the mouse to click and drag on the center vertical border; quickly resize it from left to right. The border takes about half a second to catch up with the mouse cursor as tmux repeatedly reflows all the text on the screen.

Are you by chance on macOS?

This seems to be a general issue on macOS with any terminal emulator, according to [0].

[0] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty#faq

>There are no benchmarks in which I've found Alacritty to be slower.

It's actually very, very slow.

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

I have a hard time believing this because it doesn't make sense that Hyper, an electron-based terminal emulator, would be faster than Alacritty.

Don't underestimate how bad latency can get when you're not targeting latency.

I prefer alacritty because it's less bloated. I always use dvtm

Alacritty seems far more popular (partly because it is written in Rust) though it is only some months older. But, beyond being GPU-based, it offers nothing more over other terminals. (Actually it offers less being as slim featurewise as st.) For Kitty you can even ignore GPU rendering and still have some good stuff.

I tried alacritty some time ago on Ubuntu and in my tests it was considerably slower than urxvt. In practical use both are fast enough, no perceptible difference, but urxvt is much more mature.

I also re-tried Alacritty recently, but I had severe issues using it in Sway. If it's one of two tiled windows, it warps the text in the terminal, so it isn't really usable for me.

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