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Comment by masto | Hacker News Reader

What’s modal about it?

I’m also in the “I’ve never wished my terminal were faster” camp. Certainly I’ve wished the things I run in it were faster, but that’s a different story.

I split my time between macOS and ChromeOS, and I find it easier to just stick to what’s built in. The things that add friction to my development experience are not waiting for tty characters to draw, they are hopping around between the mess of tabs and windows between the browser, VS Code, and terminal sessions, all tied for a distant third; in second place, waiting for builds; and by far and away #1, trying to understand how this goddamn maze of abstraction and indirection and microservices and frameworks works so I can figure out where to actually put my code.

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> I’m also in the “I’ve never wished my terminal were faster” camp.

In the long long ago, I remember having to limit my terminal scrollback to avoid things getting laggy. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, because terminals started taking performance seriously.

So I think advertising speed is more of a table stakes situation than a competitive advantage. I want to see that a new terminal emulator is thinking about speed because if they’re not, I can probably rule them out as an option immediately.

I hadn’t had this issue for years, about 4 months ago I started at a new company which had a big rails monolith. I’m now super conscious of ever resizing iterm, if I leave a terminal running for more than a day resizing the terminal brings the entire laptop to its knees.

> What’s modal about it?

Modal? The various input modes. Think of them as if you're using vi/vim, except that it's a terminal. Insert mode is just like every other terminal. Press Ctrl+Shift+Space to move to normal mode (configurable) and use many of the vim motions you know to navigate through your history. The supported keys go way beyond what Termite and Alacritty implement. You might find that you'll never need a mouse again (or almost never). For anything that's missing, please file a ticket, and we're going to work on that.

> Certainly I’ve wished the things I run in it were faster, but that’s a different story.

I absolutely agree. Most of the performance metrics that people talk about is beyond visual perception anyways. In Contour we've only done some optimizations the way we did it because it was actually fun to implement, and a nice little challenge.

While I myself feel like i'm pretty much hard-lining into the terminal, I accept that some things are better left to the GUI world, e.g. daily web-browsing I should not be forced to use w3m or the likes. :)

> I’m also in the “I’ve never wished my terminal were faster” camp.

I have an application that I run daily that is noticeably (15-20%) faster if I redirect terminal output to a file, or if I use a non-default terminal emulator. In this day and age, not being able to keep up with drawing 80 x 24 even with unicode is just not acceptable.

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