On: Black Screen – Both a terminal emulator and an interactive shell

[Philipp__]

I will wait for Alacritty, and will ditch iTerm2 for it. I just need super minimal and fast terminal with true colors, that's all (although I hope Alacritty won't go super minimal as they intended to in beginning)

[nicc → Philipp__]

Alacritty is so fast. It's amazing.

It has a few problems though, like I keep selecting text by mistake. Also, no tab support?

At the end of the day, I think iTerm2 is a good balance between speed and functionality.

[bmon → nicc]

Alacrity is intended​ to be used with a multiplexer like tmux, at least for now. I doubt you'll see tab support any time soon, if ever.

[Philipp__ → bmon]

And I am all for that, since i have configured and used tmux for a more than 5 years now. But what bummed me a bit is copy/paste handling (they think it should be handled by tmux, which is one of the tmux' weaknesses imho)

[bmon → Philipp__]

I'm totally with you. I haven't managed to get tmux copy paste to behave like I'd like it to, so I have a bind to toggle the mouse on or off, then use the alacritty functionality to copy. It's clunky to say the least. I hope alacritty eventually implements something like holding shift and dragging enables mouse selection (like gnome shell).

[rs86 → bmon]

Shouldn't be any other way. Modularity is such a nice idea. Much nicer than spinning up something that takes 600 MB of RAM in components not necessary to completing the task at hand.

Maybe if electron's dependencies could be compiled down to the minimum functionality needed by a given application this could work.

[RubyPinch → rs86]

As far as Alacritty is concerned, modularity can easily come with a cost.

once you add in e.g. tmux for multiplexing and scrollback, then you are bottlenecked at tmux's speeds, as opposed to the terminal emulator's speeds (not like it really matters, but its an interesting effect)

[Johnny_Brahms → RubyPinch]

That will be interesting for the tmux (or do we go all the way to nurses??) developers, because tmux has probably always been way faster than any terminal emulator it has been running in.

Where will the bottleneck be?

[RubyPinch → Johnny_Brahms]

I ain't too sure, but

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5mflek/alacrit... The Terminology (another light-weight term, with memory goals, that has scrollback) developer's comments are here

[nicc → rs86]

I wonder if Chrome providing a headless mode could somehow improve things.

[marcoms → nicc]

Doesn't headless mode just mean rendering to a bitmap instead of a window?

[nicc → marcoms]

No, but it's usually used to take screenshots and stuff like that.

It means rendering without the UI from what I understand.

[nonsince → nicc]

It's designed to be used urxvt-style, where the core has just enough features to allow other programs to build that kind of stuff on top of it.

[helb → nonsince]

URxvt has tabs, via some sort of plugins. There are (at least) two "Perl extensions" for it.

    urxvt -pe tabbed
    # or
    urxvt -pe tabbedex

Tabbedex needs to be installed, it has more features than `tabbed` (which is bundled with rxvt iirc), eg. tab renaming and moving. Looks like this: https://vgy.me/S1j8Re.png

[oblio → nonsince]

That feels like such a cop-out. The tab paradigm is widely adopted and it seems strange for a terminal developed in 2017 to aim for xterm's feature set :)

At least the core developers should provide the default tabbed wrapper on top of it.

But who knows, maybe it will be successful even without tabs.