What is the deal with getting gpu acceleration into a terminal emulator of all things? Of all the innovations that we could use, faster drawing of text doesn’t feel like it should be a priority.
GPU rendered text interfaces are pretty ubiquitous already. You can find that in IDEs, browsers, apps and GUIs of OSs. Drawing pixels is still a job the GPU excels at. No matter whether it’s just text. So I don’t see a point why we shouldn’t apply that to terminal emulators as well.
ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
on 27 Dec 21:06
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ok but such a sensational announcement like this suggests that before (and without) gpu acceleration the program was noticeably slow for some reason
It’s not just about speed, but also (battery) efficiency.
Even if you don’t notice the speed, if you are working on anything but a modern expensive laptop, you will notice the difference in battery draw between:
VS Code > NeoVim in traditional terminal > Neovim in Alacritty or Ghostty
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
on 28 Dec 13:07
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Have you ever been in a terminal, or VSCode, and started tailing a super-fast log, and control-C takes forever to stop it while a CPU core goes crazy?
Scrolling through a large text with colours and higher unicode characters (tailing a log with colour coding, for instance) can be a bit slow with Gnome’s terminal in my experience. In Alacritty (and on a machine with a GPU) it’s not.
no, that’s just minecraft being badly made. I’m talking logs running in a separate window.
aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Dec 23:45
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But thats different, the issue there isn’t the text drawing, its that it isn’t meaningfully asynchronous and console drawing is typically blocking (at least on windows)
that’s true, but the impact would still be lessened by faster rendering. and as someone who spends all day in the terminal anyway, i do see the benefits often.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
on 27 Dec 21:14
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That’s what I would have said till I tried using a TUI epub reader. The jankiness of line-level scrolling (rather than pixel-level like in a GUI app) is all but a deal breaker.
I was then most surprised to discover that terminal emulators with this amazing cutting-edge technology (smooth scrolling) do not even exist.
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
on 28 Dec 19:32
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My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I’m not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.
I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.
NewOldGuard@hexbear.net
on 27 Dec 19:15
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Nice this project was always interesting! Seems very feature rich, glad it’s out of that invite only stage
elegantbee@lemmy.world
on 27 Dec 19:28
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Unless it is trying to actually look cool like “cool retro terminal” or something, I fail to see how the point. I don’t recall ever in the history of my terminal use ever thinking “man, this terminal emulator is so slow!” I mean, really… 120fps 4k terminals. Neat I guess?
deadcatbounce@reddthat.com
on 27 Dec 21:49
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I case you didn’t see the other comments, this is a backronym to give people an excuse to say it isn’t actually racist. It comes from modding Japanese cars, referring to them as rice because they’re Asian. It’s pretty racist.
Capsicones@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 28 Dec 09:29
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It’s still racist when you make it an acronym. We know the term originally came from a racist term for Asian vehicles.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 28 Dec 09:50
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Thank you 👏
Capsicones@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 28 Dec 10:21
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And I thank you, Norah. As an Asian woman, any Linux space can feel pretty unwelcoming sometimes. Most of the time it’s the sexism, but this insistence on saying “ricing” is just another reminder that many in this space enjoy a bit of racism on the side, too.
I don’t usually say anything; I’m personally too afraid of being dragged into an endless “debate”. Perhaps a bit cowardly on my part. So, I appreciate you pointing it out first.
This is interesting. I was completely unaware of such term. This maybe because I’m not native english speaker, and where I live it hasn’t surfaced.
What baffles me most how people (the insulters) have turned it into an insult. History repeats, I guess. I think the same happened with the n word.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 30 Dec 15:09
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I don’t understand what you are saying about the n-word? It was always meant as an insult/denigration in English as far as I’m aware? Are you referring to its use in other languages as the term for the colour/shade black?
Yes. The English speakers took the word from Spanish and made in into an insult, as far as I know.
Anyway this information is relevant to me, as I’m moderator at one place. And obviously as a moderator I should identify these phrases and take action.
Since the mods deleted my post, I’ll repeat what I wrote, because aside from the unintentional racism, I feel like I made some valid points.
GPU accelerated terminal emulators are already quite popular and if you use alacrity, kitty, or wez, then you already use them. They can help with not only cool effects like smooth scrolling and transparency, but also with massive text files. Handling an 8gb text file is complicated, and using a GPU can help with that.
Ghostty’s selling points are not just the GPU acceleration, since that’s actually fairly standard nowadays. They are: (from their about page)
Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.
I for one am very excited for this terminal and can’t wait to see what kind of development comes out of it!
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 29 Dec 15:28
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Yeah, I figured you might not know, sometimes terms just become divorced enough from their original intent that the context isn’t clear. I didn’t think you were a racist at all.
I’m not against it, but another factor that we should check in a terminal emulator (as a tool where you run everything from) is the system requirements.
I’m using urxvt and that’s so easy on the system, it starts instantly. I can open multiple instances without worrying about the system resources.
I believe it uses X.org’s text rendering. X.org uses OpenGL under the hood. It’s not CPU rendered.
Alacrity felt bulkier when I tried. I will try this too though.
IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
on 28 Dec 01:58
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Alacritty felt too slow and was missing settings I wanted (like mousewheel scroll) due to devs being opinionated. Kitty has been fast and flexible for me.
You could also install or copy over the term files or something. I can’t recall. But it’s the same as getting kitty to work which has more information online.
We need to stop this usage of proprietary MS GitHub + Discord in free software. It completely undermines the philosophy.
MashedTech@lemmy.world
on 28 Dec 14:22
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Indeed.
AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world
on 28 Dec 18:03
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The rampant use of Discord in FLOSS project is really disheartening. To join yet another Discord channel to receive any kind of support or discussions around the project, is off-putting.
Like, IRC exists and it just as useful to me as discord. Set up a wiki for FAQ’s and documentation.
AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world
on 30 Dec 05:31
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Having (re)started using IRC recently, I can see it being a good alternative. But more accessible options like Matrix and Discourse are being overlooked.
MrTolkinghoen@lemmy.zip
on 29 Dec 00:36
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Discord is the worst. The siloing of tons of information that should be publicly searchable and accessible via a public forum, but instead it’s siloed off into this closed wall with shitty search.
I actually wish Lemmy was better searchable as well. I think Lemmy could be way better and drive adoption if it had a cross instance search engine / indexer.
pigeonholedpoetry@sh.itjust.works
on 29 Dec 04:30
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If your instance is federated well, how does Lemmy not already have the search you’re speaking of?
I’m unsure. I use jerboa, maybe it’s that. But search doesn’t really search the content of posts. I.e. how I can google something, include reddit in the search terms, and find a relevant post(s)
Now. Fuck google, but I want to be able to do the equivalent with Lemmy posts.
pigeonholedpoetry@sh.itjust.works
on 29 Dec 19:27
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Kagi has a fediverse lense, but I’d give the Lemmy webUI a try whenever you wanna search something up. It’s not that bad.
But aren’t room contents indexed and accessible from any client ?
With a Discord account, you can search in a Discord channel for any servers you have access to, as well as any of your private chats. This means you need to sign up with a commercial account and agree to lots of tracking and data selling, it means that information can be withheld by banning someone from a server, and that information could become very inaccessible relying on people screenshotting it and posting it on other places as has happened with information from Discord servers several times.
Matrix the protocol & its blockchain-like eventual consistency model is incredibly expensive / wasteful to run since it requires duplicating all data to all servers for the entire history. Matrix uses so much storage & RAM on a machine. Medium-sized servers regularly close their door due to costs—which further pushes users to the de facto centralized hub in Matrix.org (or servers they host for others) which basically has a copy of all metadata on the network (scary since it was originally funded by Israeli Intelligence … so one might assume they still have access to that data). If a system isn’t accessible to a run for groups on a budget, it isn’t radical/revolutionary.
If you don’t care about the centralization or E2EE, IRC/IRCv3 covers all the bases. If you want decentralization with more features, XMPP + OMEMO + MUCs, covers the rest. Neither of these are resource hogs while having over a decade of extra stability. Matrix 2 is just trying throw a rug over the problems of eventual consistency—but under it is a fundamental issue to the protocol.
Windows, Tabs, and Splits: Manage multiple terminal windows, each with several tabs and splits. Better yet, it is all rendered via native UI elements.
GPU-Accelerated Rendering: Employs Metal on macOS and OpenGL on Linux for efficient, high-speed rendering.
Hundreds of Themes: Swap between light and dark modes automatically, or choose from a vast library of visually appealing themes.
Ligatures and Grapheme Clustering: Shows ligatures flawlessly, handles multi-codepoint emoji properly, and accurately renders Arabic and Hebrew (in left-to-right mode).
Kitty Graphics Protocol Support: Let terminal applications display inline images for a richer visual experience.
It also says it’s cross platform (macOS and Linux) and has configurable shortcuts with what they believe are sensible defaults.
Although at least Alacritty already has all of these features (very different “sensible” defaults, though) and is also available on Windows so I’m not sold.
repungnant_canary@lemmy.world
on 28 Dec 22:37
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Pardon my ignorance, is the default terminal that comes with my PopOS also a “terminal emulator” and Ghostty is a replacement for that?
threaded - newest
What is the deal with getting gpu acceleration into a terminal emulator of all things? Of all the innovations that we could use, faster drawing of text doesn’t feel like it should be a priority.
GPU rendered text interfaces are pretty ubiquitous already. You can find that in IDEs, browsers, apps and GUIs of OSs. Drawing pixels is still a job the GPU excels at. No matter whether it’s just text. So I don’t see a point why we shouldn’t apply that to terminal emulators as well.
ok but such a sensational announcement like this suggests that before (and without) gpu acceleration the program was noticeably slow for some reason
It’s not just about speed, but also (battery) efficiency.
Even if you don’t notice the speed, if you are working on anything but a modern expensive laptop, you will notice the difference in battery draw between:
VS Code > NeoVim in traditional terminal > Neovim in Alacritty or Ghostty
Have you ever been in a terminal, or VSCode, and started tailing a super-fast log, and control-C takes forever to stop it while a CPU core goes crazy?
Text rendering isn’t efficient, and GPUs help.
Scrolling through a large text with colours and higher unicode characters (tailing a log with colour coding, for instance) can be a bit slow with Gnome’s terminal in my experience. In Alacritty (and on a machine with a GPU) it’s not.
text is like the slowest thing to draw :P when debugging games, a running log can make the 3D rendering stutter significantly.
See the minecraft f3 menu for a notorious example
no, that’s just minecraft being badly made. I’m talking logs running in a separate window.
But thats different, the issue there isn’t the text drawing, its that it isn’t meaningfully asynchronous and console drawing is typically blocking (at least on windows)
that’s true, but the impact would still be lessened by faster rendering. and as someone who spends all day in the terminal anyway, i do see the benefits often.
That’s what I would have said till I tried using a TUI epub reader. The jankiness of line-level scrolling (rather than pixel-level like in a GUI app) is all but a deal breaker.
I was then most surprised to discover that terminal emulators with this amazing cutting-edge technology (smooth scrolling) do not even exist.
My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I’m not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.
I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.
Nice this project was always interesting! Seems very feature rich, glad it’s out of that invite only stage
4k 120 fps ?
And HDR
Unless it is trying to actually look cool like “cool retro terminal” or something, I fail to see how the point. I don’t recall ever in the history of my terminal use ever thinking “man, this terminal emulator is so slow!” I mean, really… 120fps 4k terminals. Neat I guess?
This. If you hadn’t written it …
That’s not what GPU acceleration is used for.
.
FYI “riced out” is a pretty racist term.
.
TIL
I thought it meant granular modification as in rice grains.
I case you didn’t see the other comments, this is a backronym to give people an excuse to say it isn’t actually racist. It comes from modding Japanese cars, referring to them as rice because they’re Asian. It’s pretty racist.
It’s still racist when you make it an acronym. We know the term originally came from a racist term for Asian vehicles.
Thank you 👏
And I thank you, Norah. As an Asian woman, any Linux space can feel pretty unwelcoming sometimes. Most of the time it’s the sexism, but this insistence on saying “ricing” is just another reminder that many in this space enjoy a bit of racism on the side, too.
I don’t usually say anything; I’m personally too afraid of being dragged into an endless “debate”. Perhaps a bit cowardly on my part. So, I appreciate you pointing it out first.
TIL, thanks!
That’s obviously a backronym? The wikipedia page makes it clear it’s an offensive term.
TIL, thanks for sharing that.
Thanks.
This is interesting. I was completely unaware of such term. This maybe because I’m not native english speaker, and where I live it hasn’t surfaced. What baffles me most how people (the insulters) have turned it into an insult. History repeats, I guess. I think the same happened with the n word.
I don’t understand what you are saying about the n-word? It was always meant as an insult/denigration in English as far as I’m aware? Are you referring to its use in other languages as the term for the colour/shade black?
Yes. The English speakers took the word from Spanish and made in into an insult, as far as I know.
Anyway this information is relevant to me, as I’m moderator at one place. And obviously as a moderator I should identify these phrases and take action.
Thanks for the info. Sincerely did not know.
Since the mods deleted my post, I’ll repeat what I wrote, because aside from the unintentional racism, I feel like I made some valid points.
GPU accelerated terminal emulators are already quite popular and if you use alacrity, kitty, or wez, then you already use them. They can help with not only cool effects like smooth scrolling and transparency, but also with massive text files. Handling an 8gb text file is complicated, and using a GPU can help with that.
Ghostty’s selling points are not just the GPU acceleration, since that’s actually fairly standard nowadays. They are: (from their about page)
I for one am very excited for this terminal and can’t wait to see what kind of development comes out of it!
Yeah, I figured you might not know, sometimes terms just become divorced enough from their original intent that the context isn’t clear. I didn’t think you were a racist at all.
TIL, I need to avoid using that phrase.
But I still don’t know what it actually means. Wikipedia gave me the food, place names and acronyms. 🤷 I’ll keep digging.
EDIT: Maybe we should use “tune out” instead?
EDIT2: Found your other post with the link.
I’m not against it, but another factor that we should check in a terminal emulator (as a tool where you run everything from) is the system requirements.
I’m using urxvt and that’s so easy on the system, it starts instantly. I can open multiple instances without worrying about the system resources.
I believe it uses X.org’s text rendering. X.org uses OpenGL under the hood. It’s not CPU rendered.
Alacrity felt bulkier when I tried. I will try this too though.
Alacritty felt too slow and was missing settings I wanted (like mousewheel scroll) due to devs being opinionated. Kitty has been fast and flexible for me.
Finally a gpu accelerated Terminal emulator with tabbing.
Kitty has tabs
ohhh, I didnt know that thanks but Ghostty has Zero config by default which i like (Edit: maybe I might use wezterm)
Wezterm has tabs.
Is wezterm gpu accelerated?
Yes
Thanks
Alacritty has windows and tabs.
Idk how to activate it (And my distro Cachyos uses a custom alacrity config
What would be the best foss for Android ?
Do you mean best FOSS terminal for Android? To my knowledge, there’s only really Termux.
I tried it, and it worked well when I worked locally. But I can’t use it to SSH into my server, a lot of things just don’t work.
SSHing to machines with bash seems to work fine, but it’s a problem with ones that use fish, for some reason
I can connect with SSH, but I can’t open
nanoorw3mfor example when I’m connected.Sounds like you have an issue with your PATH for the user you’re sshing as. What does ‘/usr/bin/echo $PATH’ output when run via ssh to your server?
… or TERM?
You can do something like this:
You could also install or copy over the term files or something. I can’t recall. But it’s the same as getting kitty to work which has more information online.
We need to stop this usage of proprietary MS GitHub + Discord in free software. It completely undermines the philosophy.
Indeed.
The rampant use of Discord in FLOSS project is really disheartening. To join yet another Discord channel to receive any kind of support or discussions around the project, is off-putting.
You’re not alone with your opinion.
Like, IRC exists and it just as useful to me as discord. Set up a wiki for FAQ’s and documentation.
Having (re)started using IRC recently, I can see it being a good alternative. But more accessible options like Matrix and Discourse are being overlooked.
FAQs*
Discord is the worst. The siloing of tons of information that should be publicly searchable and accessible via a public forum, but instead it’s siloed off into this closed wall with shitty search.
I actually wish Lemmy was better searchable as well. I think Lemmy could be way better and drive adoption if it had a cross instance search engine / indexer.
If your instance is federated well, how does Lemmy not already have the search you’re speaking of?
I’m unsure. I use jerboa, maybe it’s that. But search doesn’t really search the content of posts. I.e. how I can google something, include reddit in the search terms, and find a relevant post(s)
Now. Fuck google, but I want to be able to do the equivalent with Lemmy posts.
Kagi has a fediverse lense, but I’d give the Lemmy webUI a try whenever you wanna search something up. It’s not that bad.
I’ll give it a shot. Thanks!
Plus there’s Matrix 2 now so, no excuse
Does Matrix 2 have channels?
That does not solve most of the problems; you still have to join unindexable group chats to receive any amount of support and discussion.
Right, that’s not the tool for the job. Forums boards are still best at retaining information.
But aren’t room contents indexed and accessible from any client ? they aren’t accessible from a web search engine is what I understand
With a Discord account, you can search in a Discord channel for any servers you have access to, as well as any of your private chats. This means you need to sign up with a commercial account and agree to lots of tracking and data selling, it means that information can be withheld by banning someone from a server, and that information could become very inaccessible relying on people screenshotting it and posting it on other places as has happened with information from Discord servers several times.
Yes, I was talking about Matrix
Matrix the protocol & its blockchain-like eventual consistency model is incredibly expensive / wasteful to run since it requires duplicating all data to all servers for the entire history. Matrix uses so much storage & RAM on a machine. Medium-sized servers regularly close their door due to costs—which further pushes users to the de facto centralized hub in Matrix.org (or servers they host for others) which basically has a copy of all metadata on the network (scary since it was originally funded by Israeli Intelligence … so one might assume they still have access to that data). If a system isn’t accessible to a run for groups on a budget, it isn’t radical/revolutionary.
If you don’t care about the centralization or E2EE, IRC/IRCv3 covers all the bases. If you want decentralization with more features, XMPP + OMEMO + MUCs, covers the rest. Neither of these are resource hogs while having over a decade of extra stability. Matrix 2 is just trying throw a rug over the problems of eventual consistency—but under it is a fundamental issue to the protocol.
damn that’s a bummer.
So is Alacritty, Kitty, Wezterm, and even iTerm.
The README’s About section[0] sheds no light on what sets Ghostty apart from the competition, while using vague terms and marketing hyperboles.
[0] github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty?tab=readme-ov-file…
From the website linked in the post:
It also says it’s cross platform (macOS and Linux) and has configurable shortcuts with what they believe are sensible defaults.
Although at least Alacritty already has all of these features (very different “sensible” defaults, though) and is also available on Windows so I’m not sold.
Pardon my ignorance, is the default terminal that comes with my PopOS also a “terminal emulator” and Ghostty is a replacement for that?
Yes. But it doesn’t have to replace your default terminal emulator. You can have multiple and use any of them.
We are reaching autistic levels never seen before