Hacker News Reader

Comment by doodlesdev | Hacker News Reader

As someone who still just uses whatever terminal emulator my desktop environment provides, what are the advantages of choosing another terminal emulator application? Also, what's the point of providing GPU rendering on the terminal? I've never experienced latency or any problems otherwise related to rendering, so I wonder why some terminals nowadays pride themselves in using GPU rendering. Am I missing something?

Also, which terminal emulator would you recommend?

View on HN

Some older terminals are slow enough to rate limit text output from things like streaming logs. I don't think that's specifically a GPU versus CPU, though.

I use Terminology, from the Enlightenment WM team. It's fast, supports unicode, is easily configurable, and behaves how I, personally, prefer. But if you don't really have a preference, I don't think fancy different terminals are going to be that important.

It may have something to do with this mind blowing exchange between Casey Muratori (a highly experienced game engine developer) and the Microsoft Terminal team.

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

It really highlighted how crappy software gets written in large corporations. They told him rendering monospaced fonts on the GPU would involve a multi year PHD research project.

Apparently they then went on to infiltrate his discord server so they could ask questions. Then write up a blog post calling the change "trivial".

https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761

As it turns out, the thing Muratori suggested absolutely _didn't_ work for a large variety of edge cases. That was experimented with for a couple releases before being even _more_ substantially rewritten: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/pull/14959

I hate that what was definitely intended as a joke originally turned into this massive miscommunication and flame war. Admittedly tone is hard to convey on the internet, and italics is no replacement for a good old fashioned ":P". But this could have been a good place for everyone to work together, rather than flame one another.

It's certainly an experience that everyone can learn from.

I think it is a little like when people trick out their honda civic with led lights, and new speakers, etc. It is fun, but you can get to all the same places just as well with a stock honda civic. IOW it seems there are a subset of hackers that are sort of terminal hobbyists.

You never seen a case where a slow terminal would throttle the app running because it couldn't render output fast enough ?

I use JetBrains IDEs and honestly their built in terminal emulators are embarrassingly slow. VSCode is buttery smooth in comparison. Sad state of things.

I use Terminator. I like all of the configuration that's possible with the layouts that can be done, plus it has right-click to paste, which I got used to with PuTTy. The default Terminal in Debian is very bare-bones by comparison.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com