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Comment by hdra | Hacker News Reader

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..

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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

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.

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