I'm still puzzled as to why the hell a terminal needs GPU acceleration, when urxvt could flood the entire screen at 4k just fine.
@newt@stereophonic.space @scathach@stereophonic.space less resource consumption?
@newt@stereophonic.space @scathach@stereophonic.space ...on extremely different modern hardware with extra instructions designed for rendering things to a screen efficiently yes
Using a GPU might be worth it for complex scenes, but a terminal that needs a more powerful computer to print text than what could run UT99 25 years ago is just ridiculous.
@newt @nik @scathach
Font rendering in modern terminal is order of magnitude more complex than it was back in rxvt days, when it was about displaying rows and columns of monospaced characters. Alacritty is both GPU-accelerated and in Rust, and I just don't see how it takes insane amount of time to "initialise the GL context", it opens the instant I release the keys bound to opening a new terminal 🤷
1. it isn't always there
2. occasionally it doesn't work.
The latter is the big one here. Graphics drivers even today are a total fuck.
Also, and I reiterate this, how does rendering your terminal on a GPU improve things? I refuse to believe that terminal software isn't a solved problem. Aside from integrating LLMs, how is the bestest terminal today better than urxvt from 2003? In what measurable quantity does one exceed the other?
@newt
I'm using Alacritty with Sway only — if your hardware isn't capable of EGL, you'd certainly experience issues earlier than opening the term.
> how does rendering your terminal on a GPU improve things?
I don't know, I've never ever done a side by side comparison myself, it just feels fast and I stumble upon reports of it being fast online all the time — and it is attributed to GPU acceleration.
@nik @scathach
@newt
I agree, there is nothing that would make me choose Alacritty over everything else at all costs, it was the first Wayland-capable term I tried, it was good enough and I stuck with it.
But again, it already exists, it's in Rust, it's "GPU-accelerated", and it's marginally faster — why not?
@nik @scathach
I use Konsole, but only because it comes with KDE and picks up theming and font settings from it. Should I have continued using a tiled WM - I switched to KDE only around 6 years ago, I'd probably continue with urxvt. It was and still is fine.
Then again, I keep coming to this sentiment that desktop software peaked around 2000-2005, at least when it comes to features and usability. Every piece of the modern desktop environment in every system since then has been reinvented, some even more than once (like with Windows and GNOME) and yet none of the new versions solve problems better than their predecessors. I'd argue, in many regards things have turned for the worse and this is even measurable. Flat interfaces, for one, are objectively worse at keeping the user's attention where it's supposed to go and providing visual cues.
@newt
> Rust and GPU use aren't selling points, they are mostly irrelevant technical details
They sure aren't selling points, but they also aren't "Rust… 🤮 meh, won't use" for me — that is what I mean. The term having AI assistant is sure superflurous, the fact that it's in Rust and has GPU acceleration is… Does it work well? Fine, okay!
@nik @scathach
@newt
My patched st doesn't have all that, but it has stuff that's actually useful today: support for colour emojis that isn't messy and sixel graphics which makes w3m suitable for lightweight web browsing — urxvt doesn't, why would I prefer it? It seems to me that some go above and beyond to use some software just because it's old. Take Wayland, if your video doesn't work well — it's a solid reason not to use it, but on my hardware it works perfectly.
@nik @scathach
@newt
Why smear it with shit because it doesn't support exact window placement which makes using your commercial CAD uncomfortable if I don't need any of that.
If it just doesn't work for you — fine, but why would I avoid things implemented in Rust or Wayland if they suit me perfectly? 🤷
@nik @scathach
@newt
> I'd probably continue with urxvt
I have a couple of very old ThinkPads lacking hardware EGL support and I'm using Xorg with st on them — no problem. I don't see the point in sticking with urxvt — it might seem minimal to some, but it isn't, in fact it has a bunch of legacy shit to make it compatible with some stuff from the 70s.
@nik @scathach