Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Too bad they didn't measure xterm. That one has always felt the best to me on a native Linux system by a large margin.

Also Microsft's default WSL terminal (ubuntu.exe if you happen to be running Ubuntu WSL) is a lot faster than anything else I tried on Windows. I suppose that's what you get for using a low level UI API that's optimized for performance. Its input latency is lower than any other app on Windows.

Back in December I did a Windows terminal review at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-v...

There's no scientific measurements on input latency but input latency is something I pay a lot of attention to, especially considering all you do is type into a terminal. It is the most important thing IMO. The TL;DR is the default WSL terminal is a lot better than anything else for low latency, but WSLtty is what I use personally due to it being more configurable while still being OK'ish for latency. Hyper and Terminus were the 2 worst performing terminals in both input latency and having UI bugs that made the terminal unusable for day to day usage (both Electron apps).

I use xterm for the same reason. It's really fast and lightweight in terms of memory usage and dependencies. With a tiling window manager, I don't need many features other terminals provide. urxvt feels closer in terms of latency, and offers some extra features.

A slight annoyance is that since xterm is quite old, it doesn't stick to some conventional X variables and renders colors in a slightly inconsistent way. So configuration of e.g. fonts requires an extra line or two in .Xresources. And if you run redshift, it looks a bit different than other applications. Since xterm is seeing active development again, I hope some of this gets fixed.

Only eshell feels slightly faster, something that this post kind of confirms. Eshell is a very interesting alternative to classical shells. Too bad it's a bit unfinished and sparsely documented.

Did you do any modifications to the WSL default? It's by far the slowest program on my work computer, like multiple seconds of typing latency at times. It's disgusting to use. Hyper is a bit better but it's obvious Windows wasn't designed by people who care about minor details like typing latency.

Nope. I just launched ubuntu.exe running Ubuntu 18.04 WSL on Windows 10 Pro latest stable release and it was the fastest terminal I ever used besides xterm on native Linux.

I do have Windows defender disabled. I'm not sure if it scans every key press though, but it will bring WSL's output to a grinding halt.

I use WSL / wsltty / tmux / terminal Vim (in WSL) as my primary dev environment. It's really solid, even with 1.5mb to 5mb markdown files. Vim uses about 8mb of RAM and a few % of CPU when typing. VSCode used 800MB of RAM and 50%+ of my CPU to open and idle in the same markdown file with 65%+ CPU load when typing.

In fairness, that might be less WSL and more Windows itself.

Did you do any modifications to the WSL default? It's by far the slowest program on my work computer...

There’s a interesting comment by nickjj further down this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19444804

> A few months ago I asked the MS devs why their default WSL terminal felt incredibly responsive and they replied with a ton of details.

> You can read the thread here: https://github.com/Microsoft/console/issues/327

it's obvious Windows wasn't designed by people who care about minor details like typing latency.

Given the number of people who have worked on the Windows OS with competing priorities and goals, over the course of more than 30 years, I don’t know that you can extrapolate that conclusion from personal experience (which seems to differ from the common experience) with one application.

He was on MacOS so unfortunately couldn't do xterm.

They do uxterm (which is a wrapper around xterm to put it into UTF-8 mode) here.

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

TL;DR: This quote sums it up:

"The first thing that struck me is that old programs like xterm and mlterm have the best response time, having worse case latency (2.4ms) better than the best case for all other terminals (10.6ms for st)."

Thanks for the link. Glad to see the numbers back up exactly what I felt.

I remember trying xterm, st and gnome terminal and gnome terminal was really bad. It felt comparable or maybe even worse than hyper. I also remember thinking "for such a less bloated terminal, st sure doesn't feel minimal". There was this level of latency present on st that xterm doesn't have.

xterm with tmux in my opinion is the ultimate combo. You get a lightning fast terminal and all of the features you could ever want (windows, panes, searching, etc.). With a bit of configuring, xterm can do all sorts of nice things like having clickable URLs, customized keybinds, font adjustment, etc.. Plus you can make it look good.

Tune xfps and actionfps values in config.h to really high numbers and st can be on the same level as xterm/ml-term.

macOS has xterm if you run it under XQuartz.

I use (and recommend) wsltty. Just mind your font selection on HiDPI (I use one of the Fira variants that renders fast and speedily).

How does one of the Fira variants compare to Consolas?

I never thought about my font slowing me down. Although with the ubuntu.exe terminal, Consolas was blazing fast while wsltty has a noticeable amount of delay.

But there's a new releasing coming out that should remove 30ms of input latency. That might put it on par with ubuntu.exe. We'll see.

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