Hacker News Reader

Comment by snowfield | Hacker News Reader

I know it's crass, but why? Aren't terminals good enough

It seems like they're trying to solve a problem that they've observed. I know I'd like to read more on the "recognizes user intent and supports it with rich interactions" comment. Time for a manifesto?

Perhaps I should. Don’t have a newsletter currently but RSS should work, or bookmarking the site and checking in every now and again :)

I wish somebody built an emulator as fast as xterm and as configurable as something like kitty. Until then, xterm it is.

Kitty is fast enough for me. Why is speed such a concern for you?

Have you tried 'wezTerm'?

xterm has extremely poor throughput performance. kitty and most other well designed terminals are atleast 2x as fast as xterm. For example: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/#throughput

Of all tested terminals xterm is faster only than konsole.

Xterm feels faster to me than all alternatives I've tried (not kitty). I suspect it's input to screen latency. Also, crisp bitmap fonts.

Startup is instant too.

It has comparatively very good "fidelity", giving usable screen outputs with most applications without tinkering.

A factor of 2x in throughput is nothing to sweat about I think, given that xterm is fast enough.

Haven't verified the benchmarks in your link, and not tried kitty, but I believe the bench did not test xterm with bitmap fonts which I believe are significantly faster.

I'd also look at CPU rasterization performance. I often don't have graphics acceleration available (in a VM).

You are of course welcome to use whatever terminal you like, just be aware that speed is not a reason to prefer xterm.

It lets you run commands on program output text incrementally instead of piping the initial command or re-running it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com