xterm sisters... it's over... we've lost...

@scathach is that the electron terminal?

@newt It's the SAAS electron terminal with a built-in LLM assistant

@scathach you forgot "in Rust" and "with graphics acceleration".

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?

@nik @scathach less than a piece of software designed to run on terminal from the late 80s? Are you serious?

@newt@stereophonic.space @scathach@stereophonic.space ...on extremely different modern hardware with extra instructions designed for rendering things to a screen efficiently yes

@nik @scathach except the part where launching a terminal also needs to initialise graphics context, do loads of back and forth between CPU and GPU, etc. This is why these things take forever to load, as Skadi mentioned above.

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 🤷

@m0xee @nik @scathach yeah, agreed. A GPU is absolutely required to render this. The 80s mind cannot possibly comprehend the requirements for modern terminal fonts.

@newt @nik @scathach
> A GPU is absolutely required to render this
Of course it isn't, man! I could run GLQuake on my 486 machine with Mesa's software rendering — one (!) frame per 6 seconds 😅
But if that hardware is there anyway — in absolute most of today's machines it is, why not use it?

@m0xee @nik @scathach two reasons
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

@m0xee @nik @scathach nobody knows, because it really doesn't except in ludicrous synthetic benchmarks like the one Nik linked earlier in this thread. Sure, if what you do with a terminal is endlessly scroll an infinite file as quickly as possible, alacritty is your choice. Otherwise, literally anything is just good enough.

@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

@m0xee @nik @scathach why yes? Rust and GPU use aren't selling points, they are mostly irrelevant technical details.

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.