
Terminal emulators benchmarking suite (2018) - fxfan
https://github.com/anarcat/terms-benchmarks
======
funkaster
Sad to not see kitty[0] in the list, I use it as an alternative to Alacritty
mostly because it supports font ligatures.

[0]:
[https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty](https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty)

~~~
fxfan
Kitty doesn't support fcitx input.

~~~
JdeBP
However that is not the reason given for why it is not on the list.

------
tropo
It's a strange test, giving credit for being able to show a distracting
background image under the test or letting the desktop bleed through, but
failing to check that both copy-and-paste systems are correctly functioning.

Performance tests somehow involve both Java and Python. I don't think that is
how you do it. :-)

~~~
1996
Performance tests should give metrics, not checkmarks

------
Uberphallus
Happy to see urxvt among the top performing, it's been my go to terminal for
more than a decade!

~~~
jolmg
I love it, too. It's keyboard-select extension has made me feel so much more
efficient in working that I often feel handicapped when working in another
person's terminal.

I mean, it's very often that one wants to copy part of the output of the
previous command, and it sucks to have to reach for the mouse when the part is
right there! just 1 or 2 lines above the text cursor. keyboard-select allows
me to grab it in around 5 quick keypresses. It's also been tremendously useful
to quickly determine if the big output of the previous command contains some
piece of text without having to re-run it with grep repeatedly while adjusting
the search.

That extension definitely has its warts like what happens when you go to the
top of the buffer and select everything to the bottom (gVG). It causes the
last screenful of text remain in a highlighted state as if it was originally
like that. The ability to work on urxvt extensions is actually making me
consider taking up perl.

------
chaosfox
note that alacritty has improved a lot since this, despite being less than a
year since the tests were done, I have been using it for many months now its
pretty great.

~~~
kelp
It also recently added proper underline support, which was previously a
blocker for me. Now using alacritty full time when I'm on Linux.

------
tambourine_man
I’d like to see a Mac version of those benchmarks

~~~
aboutruby
Same, I use Terminator on Linux and iTerm2 on macOS. I much prefer iTerm2 but
found Terminator to be the best on Linux (quite subjective but a bit confirmed
by this study).

~~~
tambourine_man
I never can bring myself to switch to iTerm2. It's a lot nicer all in all, and
now that they tweaked the font rendering I'm dangerously close.

But there's something about using the default system tools that keeps me
attached to Terminal.app.

~~~
reaperducer
_But there 's something about using the default system tools that keeps me
attached to Terminal.app._

The big thing that keeps Terminal in my dock is iTerm's sometimes flaky
Unicode support. In Terminal it always works. In iTerm, it's about 80/20.

I still use iTerm when I'm doing something requiring a bunch of panes. But if
I'm doing something Unicode-heavy, it's Terminal.

------
Lerc
I did a much cruder benchmark when I was trying to eek performance out of an
OLPC-XO.

I did find ~ on a home dir that took 1.5 seconds to do find ~ >dev/null

I ended up running on a version of mrxvt using bitmapped fonts which took 8
seconds. Scalable fonts took 35 seconds.

A VTE based terminal emulator took 394 seconds to display the same output.

~~~
fxfan
How does one convert regular beautiful fonts to bitmap fonts? I want to
convert Lucida console

~~~
Lerc
Not easily. There are bitmap font editing programs but they generally come
from from a time where bitmap fonts were commonly used. By today's standards
they can seem quite primitive. When I was doing stuff with them 10+ years ago
it was quite a struggle.

~~~
fxfan
Surely if their perf benefit is publicized, more people would use them
creating a demand for such tools? Oh wait- there are people who find electron
acceptable... Sad state :)

------
1996
mlterm offers me great Unicode rendering, very low latency (it feels fast) and
works very nicely with proportional fonts (yes I'm one of these persons
spreading the gospel of proportional fonts for coding)

In the previous tests I read, mlterm dominated in latency. Here, the tests do
not give numbers

~~~
Uberphallus
Can I hear more about your gospel?

------
cauterize
terminology is another great terminal emulator I use daily on Linux
[https://www.enlightenment.org/about-
terminology.md](https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology.md)

~~~
billiob
The reason not to test Terminology seems quite outdated.

~~~
JdeBP
Nonetheless, it is not. Debian Stable has not changed to a new version since
2018, and hence Terminology is currently not provided by Debian Stable.

* [https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/terminology](https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/terminology)

* [https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/terminology](https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/terminology)

------
haolez
I was thinking of moving from GNOME to Plasma as my daily driver, but the
Konsole results are kind of disappointing. I can use another terminal when on
Plasma, of course, but now I feel less inclined to change.

~~~
Vogtinator
Quite a lot of what is written there about Konsole is wrong - it supports
transparency and is not using libvte at all.

So I recommend to just ignore this entirely and evaluate which terminal
emulator you want to use solely by actually using them.

