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Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

"The single biggest win is what's not there: no oh-my-zsh, no prezto or plugin manager. I've honestly never understood the appeal of these frameworks."

"Most of these optimizations are about leaving stuff out. It's about being intentional and only adding things you're going to use."

I don't use X11 or a similar graphics layer, only textmode. Thus I don't use a terminal emulator

I don't use zsh. I use NetBSD sh

Smaller and faster

This is what I am comfortable with

Others may have their own preferences; to each their own

I might not understand others' preferences but that's their business, not mine

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I use the term "terminal emulator" in the same sense as in the blog post:

"The terminal itself

Shell startup is only half the story, because the emulator adds its own input latency. I use Ghostty, which is GPU-accelerated and native, and my config is just seven lines long."

I do not use Ghostty or anything similar^1

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terminal_emulators

Further, the terminal emulator cited by the blog author requires a graphics driver

I do not use a graphics driver

> I do not use a graphics driver.

Yes you do. It's the one that your in-kernel terminal emulator talks to in order to splat its bitmap fonts onto the screen. It is whatever wsdisplay has attached to, which can be one of a range of things from genfb through voodoofb and machfb to radeonfb. There was even a vesafb about 20 years ago.

"I do not use a graphics driver"

Maybe this is not clear. I apologise for any ambiguity

vga(4) can be referred to as a "graphics driver"

For example,

https://man.netbsd.org/vga.4

But it does not support (non-text) graphics

It only supports text

The blog author is using a graphics layer such as X11 or Wayland along with a terminal emulator such as Ghostty on top of it

I do not use those things

To be more clear, I use a "graphics driver" but only in textmode. Perhaps a better statement would be "I do not use a graphics mode"

https://man.netbsd.org/vga.4

"VGA graphics driver"

"This driver handles VGA graphics..."

I only use VGA textmode

I do not context switch into a graphics mode via 13h. No need

The blog author mentions that his terminal emulator is "GPU-accelerated" ("GPU" stands for "Graphic Processing Unit")

I don't use a terminal emulator that requires a graphics mode or one that uses a GPU

I'm interested in "text processing", displaying text. I like reading

I'm not interested in displaying images

Terminal emulators such as Ghostty usually depend on a "desktop" environment such as GNOME, KDE, etc.

I do not use a "desktop" environment

As such, I do not need the dependencies of such terminal emulators, such as "gtk" ("GIMP ToolKit") a widget toolkit for creating GUIs ("Graphical User Interfaces")

As I am only using the command line, not a "desktop", I have no need for a GUI toolkit

To be clear, I only use the VGA driver,^1 I do not use it to display non-text graphics, e.g., images, and I do not use a framebuffer on NetBSD^2

The blog author is using more than the VGA driver to display text, as indicated by the reference to "GPU-accelerated"

1. Some call this a "graphics driver" while others state it "does not do graphics"

2. For example, drivers with names ending in "fb", such as "vesafb"

> Thus I don't use a terminal emulator.

Yes you do. It's the one built into your operating system's kernel. You'll find a lot of, but not all of, its code in /usr/src/sys/dev/wscons .

"Terminal emulator" as used in the blog post refers to userland software, such as Ghostty, not a terminal emulation module in the operating system kernel

The author of the blog post is using both (a) terminal emulator userland software and (b) kernel module(s) that perform terminal emulation

I only use one. I do not use a userland terminal emulator program

On NetBSD, I don't use a framebuffer

I use the vga driver which does not do graphics

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