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Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how alacritty compares to it. The alacritty devs basically consider another terminal app rendering faster than them to be a bug on their part ;-) But it does sound like it would be a good challenge.

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> I'm curious how alacritty compares to it. The alacritty devs basically consider another terminal app rendering faster than them to be a bug on their part

Note: Alacritty prides itself on fast rendering speed, but not necessarily on low latency[0]. I'm a happy Alacritty/Linux user, but I'm not sure it would win on this benchmark.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006751

Alacritty has kind of a lot of input latency, it's noticeably worse than wsltty and the default WSL terminal -- at least back when I checked it a year ago.

I think some work has been done to improve it, but at this point IMO if you're on Windows then wsltty is as good as it gets for a general purpose terminal. If you're on Linux, xterm is top notch.

What's top notch on Wayland?

I never used Wayland, sorry.

Xorg

I don't know, I've got two panes here opened next to each other (tiled/xmonad) with xterm and alacritty, and I've been typing in those for the last 5min, and I really can't tell the difference (my monitor has 5ms latency).

Does it have 5ms response time or "input lag" because both are very very different and input lag isn't a spec you'll find on the box.

You typically need special hardware to measure it, or find review sites that go out of their way to cover it.

Kitty seemed faster than alacritty to me. I'd love to see it benchmarked, but I'd class them both in the 'fast enough' category.

I use kitty and alacritty interchangeably on Linux/X and I don't literally can't tell the difference between the two. Sometimes I forget which one I'm using. Using pretty much anything else it's very obvious.

According to [1] xterm and mlterm achieve the best values for latency.

1.: https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/

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