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Comment by petepete | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, if you do have OpenGL, why not utilise it for unparalleled terminal performance? I've used Kitty for years for that reason, it's incredibly responsive and smooth, a pleasure to use.

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What does a responsive terminal look like compared to something else? What are you doing with your terminal that demands responsiveness?

Genuinely curious. I've never ran into a situation where the standard terminals felt "sluggish"... barring a slow internet connection sshing.

It's hard to describe, things just feel quicker. Scrolling through files in vim or tailing logs is super smooth, when your grep accidentally hits a huge json file that's lurking in your project it prints instantly instead of making the terminal unresponsive for a few seconds.

I used Urxvt for about fifteen years, it didn't feel slow at all. Kitty just _feels_ faster.

You should look into Casey Muratori's quest[1] against Windows terminal slowness on github and youtube. There were some heated exchanges there and some proof of concept software created to demonstrate both how slow Windows Terminal is, and how fast a GPU enabled terminal can be.

[1] The latest video for it is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE

For one thing it's easy to build a bash line or even a NodeJS script that produces a lot of output that is dominated by the terminal's capability to render. When you benchmark it against the same thing but with a `foo > /tmp/foo.txt` redirection into a file, you'll notice that on bad terminals, it's several times or even orders of magnitudes faster than rendering to the screen. Many, many terminal emulators I have tried in the past did look sleek at first sight but then failed miserably a simple `cat manylines.txt` test.

Is kitty the one where it's really difficult to open two of them at once with different sizes and colors because those things can't be specified on the command line?

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