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Comment by photonios | Hacker News Reader

Give Alacritty [1] a try. I am very happy with its performance, it just feels fast and solid. The difference in latency is really noticeable to me compared to iTerm2 or Terminal.app. Alacritty just feels significantly faster.

[1] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

Disclaimer: I am not associated with the project in any way. Just a fan.

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People keep talking about the obvious latency difference. I don't notice any latency on iTerm2 and didn't see a difference when I was trying Kitty. What am I missing?

I use iterm2 + tmux + vim and there is noticeable latency compared to say a linux setup or using kitty

There actually is a known issue with using vim in tmux on macOS. From the Alacritty README [1]:

> This appears to be an issue outside of terminal emulators; either macOS has an IPC performance issue, or either tmux or vim (or both) have a bug. This same issue can be seen in iTerm2 and Terminal.app. I've found that if tmux is running on another machine which is connected to Alacritty via SSH, this issue disappears. Actual throughput and rendering performance are still better in Alacritty.

[1] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty#faq

Hm, interesting, thanks.

I notice the difference even when typing. The performance improvement is most noticeable for me when editing large files in vim or having a lot of tmux panes open. Alacritty and other GPU accelerated terminals perform a lot better here and things just feel smoother.

There's an older HN thread [1] on the subject with benchmarks and lots of interesting chatter. It's worth a read IMHO.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14798211

You might want to try iTerm with gpu acceleration enabled. The only caveat is you lose some visual features, like transparency, but I found it well worth it.

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