Hacker News Reader

Comment by asguy | Hacker News Reader

For people interested in playing around with different terminal emulators, you’d do yourself a service trying kitty [https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty].

It made my experience on high DPI screens far better. You can find it packaged up in the usual places (e.g. Debian).

View on HN

> Offloads rendering to the GPU

I don't understand this - isn't all rendering on a typical macOS or Linux desktop done via the GPU?

I believe the software has to take advantage of the GPU. The `foot` terminal renders on the CPU instead of the GPU, but beats GPU-accelerated `alacritty` anyway due to other effiency hacks described on their Performance page:

https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/wiki/Performance

Hmm I think it's more the case that an application has to go out of its way to not render on the GPU. High level frameworks' basic rendering operations are, of course, always GPU accelerated. They'd be crazy not to be! It looks like Foot is rendering using CPU by talking directly to the compositor.

There are various ways to take advantage of the GPU -- the so-called GPU-accelerated terminals contain bespoke OpenGL programs ("shaders") to do rendering on the GPU. Here's an interesting way of doing it: https://tomscii.sig7.se/2020/11/How-Zutty-works

Specifically, kitty uses VRAM as a font rendering cache: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance.html

Right... but doesn't every serious desktop GUI framework already do that? They aren't drawing every glyph every time from the original curves, and where else would they store video data than... the video RAM.

I've recently taken up alacritty (+ tmux), which is fast; nice, and scales on displays sensibly.

I'd been using urxvt w/ a plugin for tabs for eons previously. I'be been mutating my tmux config to match the urxvt + screen binding I've been used to.

I switched to kitty because it supports a killer feature I became accustomed to in iTerm- a keybind for "Open a new terminal in the same directory as the current terminal."

alacritty offers that as well.

This is something that I never learnt how to do with Xterm, I put the keybinding in Bash:

bind -x '"\C-T": _terminal_here'

I would love to know how to execute a command from Xterm directly, I am sure that it is possible.

Try this:

    XTerm.vt100.translations: #override \n\
        Ctrl <Key>T: spawn-new-terminal()

That opens the new terminal in the home directory, right? My keybind opens it in whatever directory I’m already in which I find handy in deeply nested projects.

It opens in the current directory, not just home.

Sweet!

Works like a charm, thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com