- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Cool project and… no screenshots? 😭
Every. Damn. Time.I mean, it’s a terminal emulator; what’s it supposed to show, a bunch of white text on black background?
It supposedly supports fancy features, so I’m curious to see how those look, they also say it’s got top of the line speed, so maybe a screencast with side by side of reference terminal emulator (xterm?) and ghostty displaying heavy throughput output to see the smoothness goodness
A screencast cannot really capture that. Practically any terminal is fast enough to render a shitton of text quickly and “smoothly”.
The difference in speed can only really be felt.
W.r.t. UI, it looks exactly like you’d expect a GTK4/adwaita terminal emulator to look.
By “can only be felt” do you mean in the way it affects the performance of your system?
No terminal emulator ever should affect the performance of the rest of your system.
I mean that totally w.r.t. how it feels to interact with the terminal emulator.
Sorry, what does w.r.t. stand for?
No terminal emulator ever should affect the performance of the rest of your system.
No idea honestly, people are saying that certain heavy output programs might just slow down the execution of other graphics related processes because text is usually expensive to draw, haven’t tried it myself
with regard/respect to
Whoever told you text is expensive to draw has no idea what they’re talking about.
For those that are, for some reason, incredulous of having more performant software (???), here’s a simple program to demonstrate the point:
use std::{ fs::File, io::{BufWriter, Write}, }; fn main() { let buf = File::create("/dev/stdout").unwrap(); let mut w = BufWriter::new(buf); let mut i = 0; while i <= 100000 { writeln!(&mut w, "{}", i).unwrap(); i += 1; } }
It simply prints the numbers 0-100000 to the screen. Compile it (
rustc path-to-file
). Run it in a non-accelerated terminal withtime ./path-to-bin
. Now time that same binary in a terminal emulator with GPU-acceleration.The difference becomes more apparent with more text. Now, imagine needing to use something like
find
on a large set of files. Doing this on a non-accelerated terminal is literally slower.It’s fine if you don’t need a GPU-accelerated terminal, but having acceleration is genuinely useful and a noticeable quality-of-life improvement if you do anything more than just basic CLI usage.
Looking at ghostty-git in AUR, zig is built on haskell? With 221 haskell libraries.
And what does it need pandoc-cli and hslua-cli for?
Checked the build.zig file for ghostty, seems to be for manpage generation. Zig itself doesn’t use Haskell though
What the hell?
Chill, it’s just pandoc.
But i use pandoc-bin, because i was annoyed by dozens of haskell lib updates each update run…
Unless you frequently build this from source, you don’t need to care about the pandoc build-time dep.
warning: this is a giant rant lol
Before the rest of my comment, let me be clear, I think this terminal is good, and i have no problems with it. My problem is with the hype.
I simply don’t understand the hype whatsoever. First of all, it’s not even faster than my current terminal. especially when running
cat /dev/random
for whatever reasonFor the test i ran this rust program i saw in a comment thread somewhere
use std::{ fs::File, io::{BufWriter, Write}, }; fn main() { let buf = File::create("/dev/stdout").unwrap(); let mut w = BufWriter::new(buf); let mut i = 0; while i <= 100000 { writeln!(&mut w, "{}", i).unwrap(); i += 1; } }
compile with
rustc
to test yourself.running the binary with
hyperfine
, i get~35ms
on my current terminal (foot), and~40ms
on ghostty.The terminal window sizes about the same size, in fact, there were 3 extra lines in
foot
so it was technically handicapped.Next is the whole “native ui thing”, which sure, if you use gnome, or mac is fine i guess, but what about kde where qt is used. And for me i simply hate title bars so i turned it off immediately and now it looks better.
I do think the tabs are cool, not much to say about that, I wouldn’t use them, but for those who do, pretty cool.
I have a similar opinion with the panes, personally i think if you want panes, just use a tiling window manager, or tmux or something, but i also dont really have a problem with this (tmux can be annoying).
If I’ve missed anything let me know, because I really dont get it.
What are the differences between all of these terminals?
If you’re occasionally using them, there aren’t any.
If you’re excessively using them, there are many.
Could you highlight a couple, I’m kinda in between with my terminal usage…
Sure, I can do that.
- If you’re looking for something lightweight, go for
st
orurxvt
. These are Xorg-only. - If you want to configure it via GUI,
xfce4-terminal
is the middle ground for lightweight and feature-rich. If you are on KDE,konsole
would suffice. You can use these on Xorg and Wayland. - If you want to work with multiple panes in a single window,
terminator
is your friend. Used this on Xorg but not sure about its Wayland compatibility. - If you want GPU acceleration and more features,
kitty
andalacritty
is out there. Both should work on Xorg and Wayland. - If you want something like st but pure Wayland,
foot
is the best lightweight terminal emulator. My current personal favourite.
Fucking legend!
Pretty sure I’m using konsole right now, whatever it is, it came pre-installed on my distro.
Might check out foot and kitty, what I’m using is working right now, but always nice to look into different options.
- If you’re looking for something lightweight, go for
ikr, i try to stay away from the stock one too
Hacker news users seem happy with its performance, so will try tomorrow. Fun with new terminals.
It’s ridiculous how much time people are spending performance optimizing terminals.
xterm on a 120MHz Pentium on X11 in the 90s performed “fine”.
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…
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.
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.
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… 👌
Looked at it, interesting, no package, installed
cosmic-term
insteadUses alacritty under the hood, with tabs and tiles!
I must be retarded. People are excited about a terminal emulator. Why?
It’s incredibly fast, has the features you would want like tabs/splits, maintains comprehensive compatibility, and is written cleanly in Zig. What’s not to like?
I’ve never seen a slow terminal emulator. Most terminals have tabs and splits. Never experienced compatibility issues. Don’t care about Zig at all.
Are these all the reasons? Another toy software written out of boredom.
Most terminal emulators are in fact slow and they can be a huge bottleneck if you run complex TUIs or workloads that print a lot of output.
Ever written a program that was extremely slow only for it to run instantly after removing your debug print statements? That’s because your terminal is slow.
Fast terminal emulators already exist, but they notably refused to add tabs/splits and overall tended to be quite janky. Ghostty merging these features may not be the most groundbreaking innovation, but a high quality piece of software that can drop-in replace something you use daily with some cool improvements is something to be excited about to me. :-)
Thanks, this clears things up. I didn’t know what exactly was making print IO slow.
I don’t use any complex TUIs. Pretty much everything is CLI or GUI. Which TUIs did you have in mind that were slow?
I’d like to test this soon. I’ll look for a modern TUI framework.
On slow terminals k9s can be rather sluggish when scrolling through the lists
Fair. I hate kube though. Most companies run just 10 pods because they cargo cult google. The complexity of it is completely unjustified
The right tool for the right job.
I agree that many small businesses jump to Kube too early. If your entire app is a monolith and maybe a few supplementary services, then Kube is massive overkill.
But many people also tend to overlook all of the other benefits that suddenly become very easy to add when you already have Kube, such as a common way to collect logs and metrics, injecting instrumentation, autoscaling, automated certificate handling, automated DNS management, encrypting internal network traffic, deployment tools that practically works out of the box, and of course immutable declarative deployments.
Of course you can build all of this yourself, when you need it, but once you have the foundation up and running, it becomes quite easy to just add a helm chart and suddenly have a new capability.
In my opinion, when the company it big enough to need a dedicated ops team, then it’s big enough to benefit from Kube.
I’ve never seen a slow terminal emulator.
https://feddit.uk/comment/14184961
Most terminals have tabs and splits.
Most for wayland have no tabs.
Why is it so funny to see issues with a terminal running in 4k? It never crossed my mind that some folks do that.
Konsole has no tabs?
Beats me.
Konsole has all the KDE dependencies.
So? You’re limited by disk space?
deleted by creator
I think I’ll stick to alacritty, but options are always fun
rn Im using Kitty, I’ll check out Ghostty later.
I <3 kitty, will probably give this a look but I’ve got kitty so well tuned to my liking at this point it’s hard for me to imagine switching
Have got kitty and xterm looking identical, multiplexing is done by zellij anyway
I think kitty is a bit snappier but honestly you could switch one out for the other and I probably wouldn’t notice
It’s awesome to see a project written with Zig!
They know what they doin. Take off every zig.
Thought out choice but disappointing nevertheless:
My stance for now is that Ghostty will not support sixels.
I get that Sixel is old AF but is there a new standard or is it just an open sea of fragmentation where everybody picks some branched attempt at doing the same thing and rolls with it instead?
Kitty Graphics Protocol seems to be the new one they’re pushing
What do you think about the Kitty Graphics Protocol?
I like Kitty Graphics. I like graphics in the terminal for two reasons:
- integration with MC (midnight commander) style directory browser to show previews of jpegs, pdfs, etc.
- w3m web browser. I like being able to use that super-light weight webrowser when working/coding to keep me focused.
Reason (1.) works with Kitty. (2.) does not. (2.) is pretty esoteric so I think sixel will probably die out soon due to the user base?