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Linux console gives me the same feeling. It's partly the font, partly the focus (no interruptions), partly the lack of latency. OSX + iTerm2 is so damn laggy vs. Linux even on worse hardware. It just sux when you have to, you know, input Chinese or open a PDF.

Gotta say though, Dune was a disappointment to me, having grown up with Dune 2 on MSDOS. The old Dune had, you know, deeper characters. There's nothing like eating boys and bathing in blood to set off a character. The new Harkonnen are positively placid. We are in a new "PC" age...

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> OSX + iTerm2 is so damn laggy vs. Linux even on worse hardware

This is one of those things you notice in a jarring way as a Linux user coming to other platforms, but people kinda look at you sideways and don't believe you when you tell them.

What I tend to notice, especially as someone who prefers to use a full screen terminal tiled with tmux, is (1) poor availability of Quake-style dropdown terminals on macOS and Windows and (2) extremely slow rendering on most terminal emulators for those platforms. On the other hand, I think I've heard some Mac users say they detect some input lag on Linux terminals.

"(1) poor availability of Quake-style dropdown terminals on macOS and Windows"

This is a feature available in both iTerm [1] as well as Windows Terminal [2].

[1] https://blog.mestwin.net/drop-down-terminal-in-macos-with-it... [2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-...

iTerm2's implementation was basically unusable the last time I tried it, for details I can't remember well. One issue was that if you have iTerm swap the command key and option keys for in-terminal keybinds, it modifies them altogether when you're using the app, breaking command-tabbing out of the app, among other keybinds. (Having it swap these was something I did because it was necessary to get some combined modifier keystrokes to go through correctly, perhaps on pain of reconfiguring each of its escape codes to match xterm individually. I can't quite recall.) To get the behavior I wanted I ended up having to bypass iTerm's drop-down behavior in favor of some Hammerspoon automation. I put up with all of this because all other terminal emulators available on macOS were abominably slow, to the point that tailing a log in any tmux window makes the entire pane lag enough to make typing suck. (And the only way to get acceptable performance in iTerm2 was by enabling hardware acceleration.)

I'm glad that Windows Terminal added that feature this year. It's better than most terminal emulators on Windows in most other ways, too. I'll try it the next time I'm on Windows.

> It just sux when you have to, you know, input Chinese or open a PDF.

Don't know about PDFs, but for Chinese IBus works just fine with XTerm.

I don't generally use PDFs for super fancy stuff like forms with JavaScript or whatever, but I generally find that KDE's Okular and GNOME's Evince work perfectly well for my needs. Acrobat Reader is a fucking hog by comparison and I loathe waiting for it to start up when I'm on operating systems where it's the standard.

Console != terminal. Console means no X11/Wayland.

Here is the bizarre part.

Open iTerm, login into a Linux VM, run vim. It will be snappier than native on the host.

Go figure.

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