this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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It's ridiculous how much time people are spending performance optimizing terminals.
xterm on a 120MHz Pentium on X11 in the 90s performed "fine".
Sure, it performed "fine".
But it was sluggish compared to the VGA ttys we were used to.
Now, if we can have something as snappy and at the same time as pretty as Eterm.. 👌
The problem with xterm is that everything else about it sucks. The only other half-decent performer is mlterm which is decent but has its share of issues.
This one feels quite snappy; better than foot.
Assuming you had a pretty decent monitor and graphics output in the 90s, it may have been 800x600, but more likely 640x480, and you'd have been using the standard issue bitmap font with no anti-aliasing, blitted to screen using software rendering. Probably in a single colour, too.
Alas, the problem with that is that it doesn't scale. On xterm a 4K monitor, I can watch Vim redrawing the screen, paging through logs is painful. Use Kitty for the same, it's instant, I can flip through tabs and split screens too, and have niceties like anti-aliased fonts and transparency if I want them.
Some people spend a lot of time in the terminal, so I can't fault them for taking the time to make a nice working environment and sharing that work with others.
"decent" hardware back then ran at 1024x768. I never ran less. And definitely multiple colors. But sure - no anti-aliasing and other features. But also on hardware several orders of magnitude slower.
Though granted I don't have a 4k monitor so maybe there are issues with that...
I mean - it's the first thing I open... Which is why I'm surprised others seem to have "performance issues" since I've never seen any.
Every Linux user has the earliest and lowest specced version of the 4k Lenovo thinkpad from back when 4k on a laptop was impractical and a stupid idea.
The "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" terminal?
Edit: that was once a comment in the sourcecode.
Hah! It's funny I just fired it up again for the first time and I do see a bit of flicker in xterm when paging full-screened in vim... So maybe there is something to performance optimizing terminals. :-)