The line was there, and you’re just waiting for it to materialize. This was a far different experience from watching the cursor crawl across the screen. There you didn’t know what was coming next. With the smooth scrolling, you did and were just, stuck, waiting on it.
Personal taste, to each their own, but I hated it.
It looks better if you have a 300 bps connection where you don't get angry by the delay it introduces. For a modern terminal, I'd suggest that the full backlog should be rendered in .5 seconds for it to still feel responsive.
And yes - I know it's a complete waste of compute resources, but, then, I also like Cool Retro Term, and it uses more compute power than NASA used to send people to the Moon, and does that 60 times per second.
I'm a cinema person, so, for me, 24 fps is the right framerate for everything.
I have found that I like TVs using interpolation to achieve a higher FPS: it makes old movies feel more alive.
Some people have reported they don't like the high framerate, as it make them feel they are watching a TV series.
Could you recommend a modern terminal that would have the features you suggest?
I'd be curious to try them to see how different it feels!
No. There's nobody doing it. I suggested it to the VTE team (VTE is the base of a lot of terminal programs running on Linux), but they (rather sensibly) highlighted the complexity this would add to the codebase and the numerous corner cases we should be worried about.
When configured properly it is, IMHO, more readable than any other terminal out there. I feel that just a little bit of "noise" helps make the text easier to read.
It's a feature you can configure
> Personal taste, to each their own, but I hated it.
I have trouble understanding how someone can hate an optional feature. What you might hate is the default configuration.
I've heard people complain about desktop switching effects on hyprland, saying they are too slow. I've found they're helpful visual hints, but we all have different preferences for "speed"
By making the desktop switching effect happen within a smaller time budget, they are not intrusive at all. It's less "buttery smooth" but it feels better than the lack of animation, or the slowness of perfect buttery smooth: it's as if the visual system of the brain could use this extra information to better interpolate and keep a visual map.
If you want smooth scrolling in the terminal, yet want to scroll text very fast (like when looking for patterns inside binaries), maybe drawing the pixel lines by packets of 5 will achieve the speed you feel comfortable with, while still providing hints to your visual system.
That's weird.
You have trouble understanding how someone could hate an optional feature and -because of that hate- turn that optional feature off and keep it off forever?
No, I have trouble understanding why someone might hate an optional feature that's either turned off by default, or that they can turn off with little effort then keep it off forever.
The lack of the feature in the first place is more of a problem. With empathy towards people who might like the feature, you see the presence of the feature as a good thing, even if it's no use (or even an inconvenience) to you. If it's an inconvenience, what you hate is the default setting.
Example: screen readers. I've been sometimes surprised by having Windows start reading text aloud after pressing a shortcut, but I then thought "actually, that's nice because people who can't use a screen have this great feature working out of the box"
OP even acknowledged that other people may like this feature: "Personal taste, to each their own, but I hated it."
Seemed like a perfectly reasonable expression of opinion to me.
One can hate something while simultaneously acknowledging the reasonableness of its continued existence.
It's distressing that (G?)PP either doesn't understand this, or is unwilling to spend enough time on reading what OP wrote to notice that this is the sentiment that OP is expressing about smooth scrolling on the VT-100.
I already know there are many things that I don't understand, but I'm willing to spend large amounts of time to improve my understanding
> I have trouble understanding how someone
is generally felt (if not understood) as aggressive, as in passive-aggressive. You literally say you "have trouble understanding *foo*" as if the problem was on your side but what is understood (and more often than not meant) is "how could anyone/you be so stupid to do/think/try this is beyond me".
"I have trouble understanding why you would use lib *foo* instead of lib *bar*" is very common on stackoverflow and other comp. sci. forums. Maybe people think it's a polite way to say things but it's worse because it's poison under veneer. If you want to point out you think it's stupid just say "I think it's stupid". 1/ it's stupid is better than you is stupid 2/ it's closer to what you want to express (or are people really so self-centred that someone else doing something they think is stupid breaks their brain ("trouble understanding")).
my 2ç.
I didn't think it was stupid, I had genuine trouble understanding how could an extra feature be hated - it didn't make sense: I thought it was maybe not the feature itself, but either the default setting, or the fact that it was a setting that could be tweaked.
But when something doesn't make sense to me, I've found it often means I've overlooked or missed something that may be evident to others (sometimes I even write: "what have I overlooked?")
Here, I missed that it would be interpreted to mean "poison under veneer".
I'd like to improve, as in "not being perceived as aggressive", so I appreciate your feedback!
Is this your own coinage? It's very good and I'm totally stealing it either way.
> Is this your own coinage? It's very good and I'm totally stealing it either way.
Yes, English is not my first language and I was trying to remember a colloquialism to translate. I was thinking of the words "veneer" (often used to indicate something is hidden with malice in my mother tongue) and "poison" as in "a viper's tongue" which is "a sharp tongue" in English and other words but I couldn't remember any aphorisms in either of languages. I thought both words would be evocative enough to convey the meaning so I went with it.
Characters would be received pretty fast, so your reading wasn't lagging by much.
I wanted to make it look like a "real computer".
This is now really what most gui apps do when you press page up/down in fact.
The one thing I did use it for was to collapse a complex display with lots of line drawing characters - customers were super-impressed by the smooth roll-up of the display as it changed from a complex input setup to a processing phase (done by defining a scroll region across a few text lines and simply outputting a new line feeds).
I realize that hardware-smooth-scrolling is different, and you emphasized that you weren't limited by the mainframe speed per-se, but I can't help but think these two 'smooth scrolling's are similar in name only. I can't picture how you could have the same problem with the smooths-scrolling feature described in this post.
Simply, I would not want anything hindering the dumping of information to my screen. I am no longer rate limited by baud rate, racing to hit ^S and ^Q to pause and continue the display output.
Rather, I'll hit a command, let it dump however many lines it wants, and then scrollback in the buffer with the scroll bar to see what I missed. This also effectively pauses fast moving output as the buffer continues to fill while I'm scrolled back.
If the information is still flowing so fast I can't make sense of it in my text window, I can either search on the text live, or Select-All, Copy a large swatch of it, switch to another window and paste it into an editor buffer and have my way with it.
My terminal buffer has "infinite" scrollback. Yes, there have been times when I've left processes running over the weekend to come back and having my machine cratered with swap because my terminal buffer was far, far too large, gorged with logging messages. C'est la vie, I'll take that minor inconvenience over the flexibility of an infinite scroll buffer.
The modern terminal environment for me is quite different from the old VT-100 days. Perhaps if the smooth scrolling was faster I would not have minded it as much back then, but it wasn't and I found the default VT-100 rate too slow. Data can scroll by too fast, but there was always other mechanics to pause and such that I can use as much or as little as I wanted, rate limited by me rather than limited by the terminal. I found that way much more flexible and suited to how I consumed information.
I think I agree with you that smooth output from command line output isn't necessary, and a fringe benefit at best.