A look at terminal emulators, part 1 [LWN.net]

A look at terminal emulators, part 1

Posted Mar 30, 2018 22:11 UTC (Fri) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844)
Parent article: A look at terminal emulators, part 1

Thanks for this series, I'm interested to hear about performance measurements! In particular, I've always felt that some terminal emulators have a noticeable (and annoying) input latency, but don't have any hard data to back that up.

One thing:

> For example, st has no scrollback buffer at all, pointing people toward terminal multiplexers like tmux and GNU Screen in its FAQ

There exist patches [0] to st to add scrollback, and many other features---pretty much anything that isn't core functionality in st must be patched in. While this may seem excessive, st's philosophy is not to have any runtime configuration files or other input, everything must be compiled in to config.h. That includes colour schemes, etc. It's thus not generally useful to install a distro-provided binary of st; better to get the source package, patch it yourself, and build that using the tools that your distro provides to build source packages.

[0] https://st.suckless.org/patches/

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st, compiling from source and latency

Posted Mar 31, 2018 1:31 UTC (Sat) by anarcat (subscriber, #66354) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, I limited myself to actual upstream software. I actually cheated a little here since the Debian package of st actually ships with the scrollback patch, if I understand this correctly. So in a way, st actually *has* scrollbacks in Debian, but it's somewhat of an exception. Interestingly, it seems to be one of the things that's holding back the package too...

And yes, compiling all of those from source would be better, but considering there are 10 different programs listed here, tested on two different operating systems, it was considered too time-consuming to go that far in the tests.

As for performance, you might like to know that latency is one of the core criteria i will look into, so stay tuned! :)

st, compiling from source and latency

Posted Mar 31, 2018 17:02 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

> And yes, compiling all of those from source would be better,

Not really. It is more useful to test the software users actually run.
Very few bother to build their terminal emulator from source.

A look at terminal emulators, part 1

Posted Mar 31, 2018 5:32 UTC (Sat) by shiar (guest, #67206) [Link]

There's a good practical test at danluu.com. Would love to see something like that for these common Linux options.

Also looking forward to memory usage, though it may be hard to compare different features. For example number of colours, amount of contents and scrollback, multiple tabs and/or instances (see Konsole advantage or urxvtdaemonisation), etc.