Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what the state of terminals is on other platforms, but on macOS iTerm2 is excellent - having every feature under the sun and very good performance. If performance is a bottleneck then Alacritty is even faster, but I've never felt performance limited in iTerm.

This makes me skeptical about new non-native terminals. Usually the pitch is faster development so more features, but iTerm2 already being feature complete makes this unnecessary, and this isn't exactly a fast moving ecosystem. UX also isn't something that can really be competed on for a terminal app as the UX is typically dictated by the shell, tool, tmux, etc. By being non-native they also lose a significant performance advantage, even if some parts are ported to native code.

So while I think Electron makes sense for a lot of apps, I'm not convinced that it's got "product-market fit" for terminals.

View on HN

I like the ligature support in Kitty.

Alacritty—I used it for a while but I didn’t really notice a performance advantage. I’m not sure what people are doing where terminal throughput really matters, and when Dan Luu did latency tests (admittedly, this was a while ago), Alacritty was middle of the pack.

Quite some time ago (~15 years?), I needed to repeatedly recompile SBCL from scratch, a process that produced multiple megabytes of output per second. I found that the gnome-terminal (which I was using at the time) increased compile time by ~4x relative to redirecting the output to /dev/null. Xterm only increased compile time by ~20%, but rxvt-unicode had no measurable overhead, so I switched over and only reconsidered when it became fashionable for CLI tools to use emoji in their output.

Stdout is frequently buffered slightly, but yeah, once you exceed it your `print(...)` line becomes blocking, and the execution moves to your terminal until it displays or discards it, freeing room in that buffer.

With large amounts of output, that can be a massive amount of time. As a really simple example, try `time dd if=/dev/random bs=1k count=1000` to print a megabyte of random data, vs `... > /dev/null`.

What about redirecting to a file? I would be worried that my eyeballs might not even be able to keep up with megabytes per second, so having the output in a file would seem more useful anyway.

You can enable ligatures in iTerm under Prefs > Profiles > Text. (Unfortunately ligatures are not supported by the Metal-based GPU renderer, which is faster than the legacy renderer.)

If you're on Wayland with properly set up GPU drivers, Alacritty was a top-tier performer on my benchmarks (sorry, didn't save them) but can be pathological in other scenarios.

Were you measuring throughput or latency? I’d expect to see good throughput measurements for Alacritty, I just think that only matters if something else has gone wrong (no terminal is slower than my eyeballs).

Honestly, the only reason I’d switch away from Kitty is because of the extremely annoying SSH behavior.

I respect the authors reasons, but practically it just sucks balls.

On Linux there are more good terminals than anyone could possibly need. I've tried a bunch - alacritty, kitty, foot, wezterm amongst others - and they all do more than I will ever need, and all do it well. I can't objectively choose between them to be honest so I've picked one arbitrarily (and I stay with it to avoid time-wasting). In any case terminals seem to me like pretty much a solved problem. If I were talented/knowledgeable enough to think I could make a really worthwhile software innovation, I'd pick something else to work on.

I’m always fascinated in what features people love about the terminal app they use. I use iTerm2, would love to hear from others what features they adore or rely on most from their terminal?

Maybe my needs are just too basic, but I've not found much reason to look beyond Apple Terminal, GNOME Terminal, etc. Probably the only feature those don't come with that I'd like is quake-style dropdown, but I don't find that worth the quirks that come with e.g. iTerm2.

Absolutely. The only major feature of iTerm2 that I use over the Apple Terminal feature set is the tmux integration, so that my tabs can exist on my server and my terminal is more of a thin-client.

True Color support is a big enough reason to switch from Terminal.app to iTerm2.app.

But beyond the cool Quake-style "hot key" overlay terminal that's always at the ready, once you start using other features of iTerm, you'll really appreciate all the amazing features it has!

For example:

- being able to press Cmd-Shift-E to quickly show/hide timestamp overlays for your entire scrollback

- pressing Opt-Cmd-B to open the time-slider of the Instant Replay feature to go back and grab output from the terminal that's not in your scrollback because it was clobbered by `less` messing up your screen

- pressing Cmd-/ to highlight the active cursor

- pressing Opt-Cmd-M to set an annotation at the cursor so you can quickly jump through your scrollback to them with Opt-Shift-Cmd-↑ and Opt-Shift-Cmd-↓

- want to know when a long-running command finishes? Just press Opt-Cmd-A in that window or pane to set an alert and you'll get a macOS notification when the prompt appears (be sure to enable Shell Integration: https://iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html)

the list goes on and on... like `vi`, iTerm rewards study of its capabilities.

No other terminal comes close...

These tips are blowing my mind. Thank you!

What a fantastic bunch of features! What Linux terminal has a similar offering?

> Probably the only feature those don't come with that I'd like is quake-style dropdown,

On Linux I use yakuake for that (was in the repo), added it to the startup applications for my desktop environment.

On my Macbook Air I didn't find anything suitable.

iTerm has this feature https://www.karam.io/blog/2018/turning-i-term-in-to-a-quake-...

> Probably the only feature those don't come with that I'd like is quake-style dropdown

I think that should be a window-manager feature anyway. Not sure about other platforms, but at least on desktop linux there are options to put any app into something like a quake dropdown.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com