Terminal emulators benchmarking suite (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Terminal emulators benchmarking suite (2018)

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72 pointsfxfan27 comments

Sad to not see kitty[0] in the list, I use it as an alternative to Alacritty mostly because it supports font ligatures.

[0]: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty

Kitty doesn't support fcitx input.

However that is not the reason given for why it is not on the list.

It's a strange test, giving credit for being able to show a distracting background image under the test or letting the desktop bleed through, but failing to check that both copy-and-paste systems are correctly functioning.

Performance tests somehow involve both Java and Python. I don't think that is how you do it. :-)

Performance tests should give metrics, not checkmarks

Happy to see urxvt among the top performing, it's been my go to terminal for more than a decade!

I'm a fan of uxrvt too. I ported it to javascript [1] years ago. Compared to all the other popular terminal emulators, especially xterm, it was much easier to understand.

[1] https://github.com/paddymul/rxvt-js

I love it, too. It's keyboard-select extension has made me feel so much more efficient in working that I often feel handicapped when working in another person's terminal.

I mean, it's very often that one wants to copy part of the output of the previous command, and it sucks to have to reach for the mouse when the part is right there! just 1 or 2 lines above the text cursor. keyboard-select allows me to grab it in around 5 quick keypresses. It's also been tremendously useful to quickly determine if the big output of the previous command contains some piece of text without having to re-run it with grep repeatedly while adjusting the search.

That extension definitely has its warts like what happens when you go to the top of the buffer and select everything to the bottom (gVG). It causes the last screenful of text remain in a highlighted state as if it was originally like that. The ability to work on urxvt extensions is actually making me consider taking up perl.

note that alacritty has improved a lot since this, despite being less than a year since the tests were done, I have been using it for many months now its pretty great.

It also recently added proper underline support, which was previously a blocker for me. Now using alacritty full time when I'm on Linux.

I’d like to see a Mac version of those benchmarks

Same, I use Terminator on Linux and iTerm2 on macOS. I much prefer iTerm2 but found Terminator to be the best on Linux (quite subjective but a bit confirmed by this study).

I never can bring myself to switch to iTerm2. It's a lot nicer all in all, and now that they tweaked the font rendering I'm dangerously close.

But there's something about using the default system tools that keeps me attached to Terminal.app.

The option to restrict selection to soft boundaries makes it really difficult for me to use anything else: if I have a tmux or vim split, iterm will detect this and allow me to select only text on one side of the split.

Ive been trying iTerm2 for he past two weeks. So many tweaks to play with. Terminal.app is like home, I shall return. Real soon.

But there's something about using the default system tools that keeps me attached to Terminal.app.

The big thing that keeps Terminal in my dock is iTerm's sometimes flaky Unicode support. In Terminal it always works. In iTerm, it's about 80/20.

I still use iTerm when I'm doing something requiring a bunch of panes. But if I'm doing something Unicode-heavy, it's Terminal.

I did a much cruder benchmark when I was trying to eek performance out of an OLPC-XO.

I did find ~ on a home dir that took 1.5 seconds to do find ~ >dev/null

I ended up running on a version of mrxvt using bitmapped fonts which took 8 seconds. Scalable fonts took 35 seconds.

A VTE based terminal emulator took 394 seconds to display the same output.

How does one convert regular beautiful fonts to bitmap fonts? I want to convert Lucida console

Not easily. There are bitmap font editing programs but they generally come from from a time where bitmap fonts were commonly used. By today's standards they can seem quite primitive. When I was doing stuff with them 10+ years ago it was quite a struggle.

Surely if their perf benefit is publicized, more people would use them creating a demand for such tools? Oh wait- there are people who find electron acceptable... Sad state :)

mlterm offers me great Unicode rendering, very low latency (it feels fast) and works very nicely with proportional fonts (yes I'm one of these persons spreading the gospel of proportional fonts for coding)

In the previous tests I read, mlterm dominated in latency. Here, the tests do not give numbers

Can I hear more about your gospel?

terminology is another great terminal emulator I use daily on Linux https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology.md

The reason not to test Terminology seems quite outdated.

Nonetheless, it is not. Debian Stable has not changed to a new version since 2018, and hence Terminology is currently not provided by Debian Stable.

* https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/terminology

* https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/terminology

I was thinking of moving from GNOME to Plasma as my daily driver, but the Konsole results are kind of disappointing. I can use another terminal when on Plasma, of course, but now I feel less inclined to change.

Quite a lot of what is written there about Konsole is wrong - it supports transparency and is not using libvte at all.

So I recommend to just ignore this entirely and evaluate which terminal emulator you want to use solely by actually using them.

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