Thought out choice but disappointing nevertheless:
My stance for now is that Ghostty will not support sixels.
Looked at it, interesting, no package, installed cosmic-term instead
Uses alacritty under the hood, with tabs and tiles!
Looking at ghostty-git in AUR, zig is built on haskell? With 221 haskell libraries.
And what does it need pandoc-cli and hslua-cli for?
Checked the build.zig file for ghostty, seems to be for manpage generation. Zig itself doesn't use Haskell though
What the hell?
Chill, it's just pandoc.
But i use pandoc-bin, because i was annoyed by dozens of haskell lib updates each update run...
It's ridiculous how much time people are spending performance optimizing terminals.
xterm on a 120MHz Pentium on X11 in the 90s performed "fine".
The problem with xterm is that everything else about it sucks. The only other half-decent performer is mlterm which is decent but has its share of issues.
This one feels quite snappy; better than foot.
Sure, it performed "fine".
But it was sluggish compared to the VGA ttys we were used to.
Now, if we can have something as snappy and at the same time as pretty as Eterm.. 👌
Every Linux user has the earliest and lowest specced version of the 4k Lenovo thinkpad from back when 4k on a laptop was impractical and a stupid idea.
Assuming you had a pretty decent monitor and graphics output in the 90s, it may have been 800x600, but more likely 640x480, and you'd have been using the standard issue bitmap font with no anti-aliasing, blitted to screen using software rendering. Probably in a single colour, too.
Alas, the problem with that is that it doesn't scale. On xterm a 4K monitor, I can watch Vim redrawing the screen, paging through logs is painful. Use Kitty for the same, it's instant, I can flip through tabs and split screens too, and have niceties like anti-aliased fonts and transparency if I want them.
Some people spend a lot of time in the terminal, so I can't fault them for taking the time to make a nice working environment and sharing that work with others.
"decent" hardware back then ran at 1024x768. I never ran less. And definitely multiple colors. But sure - no anti-aliasing and other features. But also on hardware several orders of magnitude slower.
Though granted I don't have a 4k monitor so maybe there are issues with that...
Some people spend a lot of time in the terminal, so I can’t fault them for taking the time to make a nice working environment and sharing that work with others.
I mean - it's the first thing I open... Which is why I'm surprised others seem to have "performance issues" since I've never seen any.
The "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" terminal?
Edit: that was once a comment in the sourcecode.
Hah! It's funny I just fired it up again for the first time and I do see a bit of flicker in xterm when paging full-screened in vim... So maybe there is something to performance optimizing terminals. :-)
Hm... I don't see it stating anything about wayland, but since it says "native" in some many places, I need to assume it won't use Xwayland, unless specifically told to.
Right? Anyone to confirm?
It works natively on Wayland. The UI uses gtk4.
i dont have xwayland, and it worked (though i did not test enough(lack of interest))
Cool project and... no screenshots? 😭
Every. Damn. Time.
I mean, it's a terminal emulator; what's it supposed to show, a bunch of white text on black background?
It supposedly supports fancy features, so I'm curious to see how those look, they also say it's got top of the line speed, so maybe a screencast with side by side of reference terminal emulator (xterm?) and ghostty displaying heavy throughput output to see the smoothness goodness
Lol right?
Any speed comparison?
What are the differences between all of these terminals?
If you're occasionally using them, there aren't any.
If you're excessively using them, there are many.
Could you highlight a couple, I'm kinda in between with my terminal usage....
Sure, I can do that.
st or urxvt. These are Xorg-only.xfce4-terminal is the middle ground for lightweight and feature-rich. If you are on KDE, konsole would suffice. You can use these on Xorg and Wayland.terminator is your friend. Used this on Xorg but not sure about its Wayland compatibility.kitty and alacritty is out there. Both should work on Xorg and Wayland.foot is the best lightweight terminal emulator. My current personal favourite.Fucking legend!
Pretty sure I'm using konsole right now, whatever it is, it came pre-installed on my distro.
Might check out foot and kitty, what I'm using is working right now, but always nice to look into different options.
Yeah, it's one of the greatest characteristics of FOSS. We have many options and endless posibilities.
Glad to help.
ikr, i try to stay away from the stock one too
It’s awesome to see a project written with Zig!
They know what they doin. Take off every zig.
And now that song is back in my head. Thanks man :|
I must be retarded. People are excited about a terminal emulator. Why?
People gets excited to see something written in their favourite niche language.
I actually like Zig. I wish something like CUDA was available in it.
It's incredibly fast, has the features you would want like tabs/splits, maintains comprehensive compatibility, and is written cleanly in Zig. What's not to like?
I've never seen a slow terminal emulator. Most terminals have tabs and splits. Never experienced compatibility issues. Don't care about Zig at all.
Are these all the reasons? Another toy software written out of boredom.
Most terminal emulators are in fact slow and they can be a huge bottleneck if you run complex TUIs or workloads that print a lot of output.
Ever written a program that was extremely slow only for it to run instantly after removing your debug print statements? That's because your terminal is slow.
Fast terminal emulators already exist, but they notably refused to add tabs/splits and overall tended to be quite janky. Ghostty merging these features may not be the most groundbreaking innovation, but a high quality piece of software that can drop-in replace something you use daily with some cool improvements is something to be excited about to me. :-)
Thanks, this clears things up. I didn't know what exactly was making print IO slow.
I don't use any complex TUIs. Pretty much everything is CLI or GUI. Which TUIs did you have in mind that were slow?
I'd like to test this soon. I'll look for a modern TUI framework.
On slow terminals k9s can be rather sluggish when scrolling through the lists
Fair. I hate kube though. Most companies run just 10 pods because they cargo cult google. The complexity of it is completely unjustified
I've never seen a slow terminal emulator.
https://feddit.uk/comment/14184961
Most terminals have tabs and splits.
Most for wayland have no tabs.
Why is it so funny to see issues with a terminal running in 4k? It never crossed my mind that some folks do that.
Konsole has no tabs?
Yeah, I couldn't care less what language its written in
But does it roll down like Yakuake did before I updated Fedora and broke it? :( That’s all I want.
Yes, it calls that its “quick terminal” feature
Okay, I’m sold.
Hey OP, what is the coolest feature?
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