On: A look at terminal emulators, part 2

[craftyguy]

It's surprising how (relatively) poorly Alacritty did. The first question in their FAQ still says:

> Is it really the fastest terminal emulator?

> In the terminals I've benchmarked against, alacritty is either faster, WAY faster, or at least neutral. There are no benchmarks in which I've found Alacritty to be slower.

Despite them already acknowledging that they have problems with latency[1]

1. https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/673

[aumerle → craftyguy]

That's because alacritty claim's are pure bullshit: https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/289

[ohazi → craftyguy]

For a long time, the response to "but what about scrolling?" has been "eh, just use tmux"

I think the author may have walked back on that a bit, but this is definitely the thing that turned away most of the people I know who tried it.

[craftyguy → ohazi]

I actually just started using alacritty full-time recently, after walking away from it a few months ago because of the lack of scrollback. The only reason I'm back is because I am now super comfortable with using tmux in my workflow (and tmux's scrollback), so I don't need scrollback in a term. emulator any more.

[JdeBP → ohazi]

You are conflating the presence of scrollback buffering with scrolling speed. craftyguy was talking about speed, and thus the latter.

[xfer → craftyguy]

Also, it requires opengl 3(iirc), so you can't even run on a lot of older computers(2012 era?). I can't on a x201.

[floatboth → xfer]

2012 is Sandy-Ivy Bridge era, x201 is older than that

[strmpnk → floatboth]

I believe the x201 was from 2010. I can add that I can't use alacritty on my x201 for this reason as well. I've stuck with st since I find it easy to customize (Xresources seems to require scanning lots of documentation vs just a quick grep in code) but I wouldn't call it anything special. I might switch to mlterm if I can put in the effort to learn the Xresource incantations I need.

[NiceGuy_Ty → craftyguy]

I believe that's because Alacritty focused on optimizing for throughput instead of latency. That is it will take less time to render a large chunk of output, such as running yes.