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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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