Last I heard there were. A library interface is required. I've spent at least 6+ straight months on iTerm2 3.x, kitty, and Alacritty (my current primary terminal), and briefly tried Terminal. It has been listed on the arch wiki under their list of available terminal emulators for a long time and I often use the wiki to look up things even when having to configure things on non-arch systems. It's very fast and has the best support for ligatures I've seen in a terminal. A good terminal emulator for Windows will be flexible both in its utility and used to access the command-line interface. That's why I suggested a custom $SHELL (I guess there's no need to reinvent the command line so you could probably use a multiplexer instead?) Most emulators and virtual machines can do this. Also escape are inlined so they would also be captured via the parents method. That sounds interesting! He took the time to do some investigation and explain what was going on. Kitty is fast. His site is served with SPDY and HTTP2 protocols. If I take a snapshot, then a character is output to the terminal, and then I load that snapshot, the character needs to disappear from the screen. I like the stacked layout: window 1 fills the full height on the left half of the screen, all other windows are stacked on the right half. First, I have set iTerm2 to use the dark solarized colour scheme. Regarding storing the previous session, there are already terminal emulators out there that will restore the scroll back session from a previous instance, so you might find your idlogical terminal already exists. Why render with the GPU? Report Save. (Actually it offers less being as slim featurewise as st.) For Kitty you can even ignore GPU rendering and still have some good stuff. And I really don't want tmux running on top just for scrolling. You can restore the virtual machine with the terminal state intact. Core Graphics generally does not use the GPU for text blitting in most Mac apps, so having a custom renderer can help here. Installation Instructions Just wait 2-3 years and GNU / Linux will be the way to go. Maybe you have something in your config that's slowing it down? [0] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty#faq. Ligature Font. For this example, suppose it is DOS running a multi-user BBS with 2 modems. I have the following lines in my .vimrc. For better responsivity I suppose a terminal that behaves like mosh would be a good approach. Nothing that is going to empower you do do things you can't now; rather just nice features that make address the quirky needs of heavy shell users. Macbook keyboards had more latency than an external Apple keyboard. It's easy to find if you search for terminal emulators with low latency. Fluent Terminal is described as 'terminal emulator based on UWP and web technologies.FEATURES- Terminal for PowerShell, CMD, WSL or custom shells' and is an app in the OS & Utilities category. Wow. This is what I was curious about as well. I mentioned PTYs because I don't want them. Comparing these 3 terminals on the same machine/config, iTerm stands out as the slowest of the bunch. iTerm2. That means that the source code of PuTTY was copied and altered some time ago to develop this separate utility. Assuming the terminal programs don't 'announce' when they've finished rendering, the only way to this test properly would be a white-box approach, hooking into the code of the various terminal programs, right? An arctic, north-bluish clean and elegant Kitty theme. That's insane. Consider downloading either Mozilla >=1.4 or Internet Explorer >= 6. Indeed, it is! I would love to drop tmux in favor of kitty’s sessions and multiplexing, but old habits die hard, so it will take some time. Could you share your config that makes Kitty behave more like iTerm 2? Yup, I was reading through thinking there was some major update to Kitty and was a bit confused when the page said it was only available for Linux and Mac. It's still a little odd to me that something as conceptually simple as a terminal emulator should require a full blown GPU in order to perform smoothly. This performs almost 100x worse than Mac OS Terminal.app. Would you please share your config? I received a helpful and polite response. If you plan to just use iTerm2, you can skip this section and just grab the GeoVim key profile config for your terminal. (It's my current emulator of choice though !). Not affiliated, but recently switched to Kitty from iTerm 2 on OS X on my main at-work MacBook Pro and I’ve been very impressed. I was pretty impressed when I found alacritty a while ago, but I stopped using it as I soon found out that pretty much any speed gain I got from using the terminal is pretty much negated from having to use tmux in order to have any form of window management.. Could you please provide more details on the speed issues with tmux? Apple fixed this when they launched OSX in 2000 or so. VS Code port repo. I've been using Kitty for a month now. It also includes ports to Terminal, Konsole, PuTTY, Xresources, XRDB, Remmina, Termite, XFCE, Tilda, FreeBSD VT, Terminator, Kitty, MobaXterm, LXTerminal, Microsoft's Windows Terminal, Visual Studio, Alacritty. Suggesting a bespoke BBS server is like telling a person running Super Mario All-Stars in a Super Nintendo emulator that they should upgrade to a PC game. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-... http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=76627. Simics can do it. That even includes stuff like incomplete escape sequences, such as when just the first byte of the escape sequence has been passed to the terminal. The difference with kitty is that the scrolling feels smoother and uses less CPU, for the same task, thereby saving battery and pleasing your eyes. Perhaps for other terminals or systems this is normal, but it isn't exactly par for the course for the tools I've worked with prior. It is typical for emulator authors to just give up, letting the terminal be inconsistent after loading a snapshot. If you plan to just use iTerm2, you can skip this section and just grab the GeoVim key profile config for your terminal. The idea being I can then just use new windows for applications, and have the same keyboard shortcuts and semantics for tabs everywhere. In case you missed it, I am an author of an emulator. All it does is print a counter to the serial port, once per hour. Even on master I've just felt alacritty being a bit glitchy with regular rendering issues. Browse the list of Best terminal emulators for Windows, including, Cmder, ConsoleZ, ZOC, ConEmu and more. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#using-a-color-theme... https://kovidgoyal.net/scripts/VisualDocumentAPI.js, https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code, https://github.com/christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8213946, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949657, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949814, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949897, https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/index.html#scrolling, https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf.html, https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance.html, https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/wikis/Metal-Renderer. Okay. Usually, offloading to the GPU will get you higher throughout but also higher latency. > To elaborate, the GL driver is incorrectly treating const variables in the shaders as uniforms. But relying on tmux for scrolling seems to be a case of "penny wise and pound foolish". It's a terminal. Yes you can. So, it kind of makes sense to use the GPU for this. Maintainer has also been responsive on GitHub. Just capture the output from the serial port in a buffer inside the emulator, and use that to save snapshots. It works on Macs with macOS 10.10 or newer' and is a well-known app in the OS & Utilities category. Damn. For example, an escape code could change the color. Scroll to the bottom and paste these colors: I mean, I love how user friendly (meaning configuration and all) kitty is out of the box. Developed by George Nachman Videos are the worst. We had terminals that were way faster than you could type or see 30 years ago. - ConEmu-Maximus5 is a full-featured local terminal for Windows devs, admins and users. (compared to Apple's Terminal.app, which I found to be the fastest and least problematic on a Mac), From the performance page: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance.html. Not OP, but they are an essential component of some languages' writing systems, so it could be that. It has numerous slow serial lines to which one may attach terminals, modems, or consoles. I'm using macOS and unfortunately not familiar with how I'd do that, but I'm sure it would be easy with something like i3wm on linux (which I still miss after moving away from linux 3 years ago :/), but I don't know what I could use in macOS. KiTTY has all features from PuTTY and adds many more features. Yeah. That screen session will be connected to your BBS and you'll then have your detachable but persistent terminal sessions. They're a shell and a CLI/TUI text editor that feel incredibly modern compared to their predecessors (i.e. You have to read that, yeah, but maybe you can get a screen reader to read it for you. The emulator runs, and the guest OS inside it boots up. Direct2D, the newer API, does use the GPU for blitting text. rxvt-unicode. In practice, all that is inevitably coupled with monstrous pile of Javascript frameworks and dynamic loading and whatnot, and loads for 10 seconds on good days. I would have thought using a GPU would make latency. We do that, and a colorful menu is displayed on each of them. Given the fact that terminal doesn't necessarily need to render if there are no changes, using GPU seems like an overkill for regular use. It's the same for Firefox (61.0.2), maybe the version number is detected wrongly on the new versions. picom. 239 78 . Thanks to mrmartineau, the Rigel theme is ported to VS Code, which can be found here. More importantly, making a video probably takes more time that having a nice write-up about anything. 1 25 5.3 Shell The Ricer's canvas. E.g. I don't think I've seen a visually slow terminal emulator since 2000 and barely even in the 1990's. It's disgusting. It adds extra features to PuTTY. Nearly all text rendering libraries I've checked uses the GPU. It would then be properly snapshotted. It is most certainly reading from a drive, or from a TCP stream. level 2. To install iTerm2, open the terminal and run: $ brew cask install iterm2 Zsh (skip – macOS Catalina users) The Metal API is great and I'm glad iTerm2 supports it. You can create a new window using the ctrl+shift+enter key combination.. 2 years ago. The border takes about half a second to catch up with the mouse cursor as tmux repeatedly reflows all the text on the screen. Try it. I think there is one that takes ANSI codes seriously enough to support double-height and width. WinSSHTerm. 494 77 . KiTTY is a fork from version 0.70 of PuTTY. I should note these results are all from second runs. It's far faster that WSL. I couldn't find one in the config, unless it has a different name. The only thing that's stopping me from using it as my primary terminal is the poor colour support and poor split window support (and setting shortcuts to go between them). It reads from a drive, encrypts each file and writes it, so there is an element of a large buffer to hold. The big idea of Alacritty is that it uses the GPU for superfast rendering and updates. You can freely resize layouts using hte keyboard (but not the mouse) see. There are more than 50 alternatives to iTerm for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD and iPad. Quite impressed. Which is a major no-no anyway, typographically speaking. We've been doing it for decades with significantly less latency on significantly slower hardware. Not to be confused with Kitty, the terminal emulator. And I find that it's much better than tmux performance-wise. It's called a "terminal multiplexer" and that is exactly what I suggested with the tmux solution right from the bloody start. Other interesting Windows alternatives to iTerm2 are Hyper (Free, Open Source), MobaXterm (Freemium), KiTTY (Free, Open Source) and Alacritty (Free, Open Source). It was derived from and has mostly supplanted the earlier "iTerm" application. This doesn't work on half of Nvidia-powered laptops: Kovid Goyal is infamous/known to be a bit toxic, see Calibre: Personally I'm willing to give the guy a chance -- unaware of this history, I reported an issue with kitty on Github after the last time it was posted to HN. I really like it. that could manage the running state of the executing programs and their PTY. Another nice thing about having the terminal windows built into the emulator is that they all go away when the emulator does, even if that is a crash. Typically the VM software only provides a serial port to the VM, which the user will then associate with something else via the VM configuration. Replace 'scrolling' with 'scrollback' when you read my comment. iTerm2. The CPU is certainly not writing pixels directly out to VESA buffers in 2018, right? (CG is usually what "Quartz" refers to, though the brand is so overloaded at this point that it's hard to make any general statements about it.) Good times! The terminal retains the old state however, because it is a separate program with no awareness of the fact that I just loaded the 0123.snap file into my emulator. Our goal is to be objective, While it is possible to invoke xterm with the very buggy -S option, there is no way for the emulator to suck the state back out of xterm for coherent snapshots. The guest OS running in the emulator is just a bootable floppy image for testing. For example, how are they different and which one is better? Their wsltty installer works wonders: It’ll probably get one when pty support comes out this fall. Sorry, DE/WM? I prefer alacritty because it's less bloated. Some terminals can even make that persistent. Check out the impressive features and screenshots. Wow! We are talking about terminals. Even if you actually were paying money for his services, which most of us are not, which would you prefer an obsequious kind person who didn't fix your problem or a dick that did. Gpu powered terminal emulator? Comparing these 3 terminals on the same machine/config, iTerm stands out as the slowest of the bunch. kitty deliberately throttles input parsing and output rendering to minimize resource usage while still being able to sink output faster than any real world program can produce it. ... but lately it came with some bugs and until new update i'm just using iTerm. This works OK until I want to load a snapshot. Though on the other hand, again, I can almost see the sense; I also have some serious beefs with the core design of the linux mount API right down to the syscall level.). This turns out to be almost exactly what I was proposing, with the terminal state implemented by a library within the emulator. https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology. also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949897. In the above example, the guest OS (a DOS BBS) never did any kernel syscalls related to PTY operating mode. ... iTerm2. He can keep his tmux configuration and use it when he needs to in the future. Good times. Some additional speed could probably be squeezed out with something like anycast DNS. Layouts ¶. Split the tmux window into quarters and pull up some logs in each pane. KiTTY VS iTerm2 Compare KiTTY VS iTerm2 and see what are their differences. Text on a plain background shouldn't be hard to do. It wasnt fun writing CDs back in then days. I want to hook this up to an emulator (like qemu or MAME) with an emulated serial port. vs. LXTerminal vs ConEmu With the greatest of respect, the way you casually drop technical terms out of context suggests to me that you really don't understand how terminals work in the slightest. However I do agree with your point that this "shouldn't" happen in practice (ie any decent hardware you'd expect to have buffers to prevent that kind of write errors). You keep trying to reinvent terminals with features that already exist to solve a problem that needs to be fixed in the server itself. "Complete out of the box" is the primary reason people pick iTerm2 over the competition. This is a. I'm normally not a BSD user. PuTTY Each terminal window remains blank, which is not the correct state. For instance, iTerm supports italic, which Terminal.app doesn't. Product hunt? Ya, give me a new version of what I have, and will last at least another 8 years (fully supported by MacOS releases), and price it under $2000. Storing the running state of the program that's writing to the... serial port or whatever... is a solved issue. Alacritty - A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator. The CPU registers, the RAM, and everything else within the emulator are now as they were earlier. Maybe I could find some third-party solution just to show/hide a particular application. A terminal emulator for macOS that does amazing things. Have you managed to configure it to behave similar to iTerm 2 Terminus. Do open source projects just not check for name conflicts when creating their packages? Try it out if you're on GNU / Linux. The text mode was 80x25 characters, 9x16 pixels/each, so the effective output resolution was 720x400 pixels. An xterm is very special because xterm supports the -S option. The terminal then shows 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 4. The numbers are simply wrong. The guest OS carries on from the original point of course, since that is what the CPU and RAM state dictates, so a "4" will be printed next. > I'm widely known for my extreme stupidity. Installing now. This whole conversation is weird, and I'm really not sure what is missing from my explanation. The beauty of open source is you can look at the code and even the issue tracker. It's simple, take for example scrolling a file in less. About a year ago I was deciding between Kitty and Alacritty and I chose Kitty because of 2 important features it had over Alacritty: proper underline rendering (Alacritty just draws underscores) and text selection with Shift+Mouse. This is called flow control, which is implemented by putting the consumer to sleep when the buffer from the producer to the consumer terminal is full. An arctic, north-bluish clean and elegant Kitty theme. As I said, capturing the TTY output is the easy part. A bit unfortunate since this is a successor? It also has an incremental search banner instead of a find dialog. Also, as others have noted, with many new layers of abstraction between user and system including the compositor, window manager, display manager, display server, and probably a host of others within the operating system and places I'm unfamiliar with. I'm the author of several serial interfaces for 8 bit micros plus a bunch of Linux terminal solutions. Show Changelog Hide Changelog 3.4.3 - Fix crashes. The only thing you would lose is your TCP/IP handshake to the xterm / PuTTY session but they're detachable anyway via tmux / screen so you'd just have to SSH back into the host and reattach to your multiplexer (screen / tmux). Most modern terminals are fast enough that you can do it at the key repeat rate of your computer. We will help you find alternatives and reviews of the services you already use. I did measure xterm which takes over a minute for both tests and also stresses out X.