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Forgive me as it's not my area of expertise, but why does the world even need a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator ?!?

Surely even the worst of the worst motherboard embedded graphics can cope with displaying some text in a window ? Its something computers have managed to do since their invention ?




I would like to know this too. GPU accelerated terminals are growing in number so there must be a use case. I'm an avid terminal user, but I've never discovered this.


Displaying terminal output nowadays is more complex than 30 years ago.

Today you want to be able to render high dpi text on a 4k display, possibly on multiple monitors in multiple terminals at the same time.

And you better have more than 240 FPS (terminal render updates per second), because some displays run at 240hz or higher and you don't want your terminal to produce flicker on your screen.


@hutrdvnj

I'm sorry, what ?!

I use SSH a lot every single day. Not once have I thought "sheesh, this is slow".

Before SSH became the default, I spent even more of my life on Telnet. Same again, never had a problem.

I also sometimes do console connections to switches and routers.

The only lagging I've ever seen in a terminal window is when I've been on the end of a poor internet connection !

And yes I've done it on 4k displays and multiple monitors and multiple terminals.

I've never observed any flicker either (and yes I use non-standard "modern" fonts).

I've never had problems with Microsoft Word or Notepad either !

I'm sorry but I fail to see why a terminal emulator needs the same power as Photoshop or your favourite game.

Frankly I would put a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator in the category of "product solving a problem that doesn't need to be solved".


I'm very sensitive to terminal latency and I find terminals like gnome terminal and the like are simply too slow for me. I use xterm on daily basis because it provides the best latency.

https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/

I know it's not an issue for many and they tell you "excuses me, what?", but I can tell you, it's a thing.


Is there a specific scenario where you notice latency?


Yes, always. I can immediately notice the difference when I type on lets a gnome terminal vs. xterm. But it's not only related to terminals. I have the same issue with editors. For example, the Atom editor is unbearable slow, VSCode is slow, Vim with a few plugins (incl. syntax highlighting and the like) is okayish and plain vi is fast. At least that's how I experience it. I decided to go with vim + plugins, because it provides the best tradeoff in terms of features and latency.


Interesting. I've never experienced latency. I use a 2k monitor. I guess the jump from 2k to 4k is big. I use terminals for text editing with vim (my only IDE), and basic command line stuff like grepping logs, dealing with git and such. I've used xterm, rxvt and st.

When I think about it, there's no smooth movements in my usage. Scrolling is at least one line at a time, cursor movement is at least one character width at a time. So I would be hard pressed to notice latency.

Btw, 240 fps is a very minimal jump from 120 fps. It's much less than 60 to 120. I can't imagine ever being able to tell if my terminal is getting drawn faster than ~50 hz. Well maybe if I was scrolling more than 50 lines per second, but I would probably not care how it looks.


I agree 240hz is maybe a bit extreme. But I think that most people could immediately tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz.

> but I would probably not care how it looks.

Me too. It's not about aesthetics, I don't care much about it. It's how it feels, slightly higher latency gives me an uncomfortable feeling during computer interaction.

If I had to decide between something that looks very pleasant, but is slow and something that looks crappy but is ultra fast in terms of latency, then I would always pick the latter.


Okay, so it is used for rendering the text to the display? Do IDE's use hardware acceleration? I'd think it is kinda the same general thing.


- Eventually someone is going to bring back RIP graphics and send GPU commands down a text-terminal pipe, and think they were the first ones to do it.

- Also: only this way can we lay the groundwork to get terminals to look like the hilarious parodies of computer interfaces in movies.




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