[KirinDave]

Oh?

Historically most terminal implementations have been fraught with performance issues. We'd moved off xterm to aterm and then back. We'd been hesitant to adopt gnome-terminal because of the GTK+ chrome then saw its font kit actually rendered faster.

What most people don't get is how absurdly well-optimized the text rendering and reflowing is for web browsers. With care, people can get modern cellphone browsers to hit 60fps animations and reflows while pushing huge volumes of text through them.

Take any 3 GUI toolkits you can name and ask yourself, "Do all three of these combined have a maintenance budget that equals that of even Firefox by itself, let alone any TWO modern web browsers?" Hell, some of the most cutting edge research into interpreters and garbage collectors is coming out of Google making V8 fast.

Quite frankly, I'd bet that with care and foresight this could be faster than iTerm.

[placeybordeaux]

Maybe I am wrong, but I have yet to see a modern browser take anywhere near as little memory of CPU as a modern terminal emulator.

There is also the matter that no matter how much optimization you put into something you can't recoup the cost of the fundamental design choices you went with. Choosing something with less power can solve a lot of headaches.

[KirinDave]

> little memory of CPU as a modern terminal emulator.

Browser instances can be quite svelte. But uh... I mean... shared lib pages tend to be actually shared pages. That's why the physical memory for multiple browser instances is a lot lower.

What's more, I'd gladly pay a higher price for a richer experience. We no longer need to or should rely on ANSI interfaces. In fact, they're becoming increasingly awkward in a world that really wants endpoints to be stateless by design rather than stateful sockets.

Many people have already discarded the single socket model oh SSH in favor of Mosh. Let's also ditch the console for all but the most basic of tasks. It's not 1997, the lingering stink of proprietary rich client environments is cleansed. Web browsers have annihilated that assumption and made something truly open and pretty amazing.

I use a web browser as my core text editor and I miss emacs not a whit and quite honestly it feels more responsive than my emacs setup. I don't notice any tangible performance differences from Vim in a terminal.

We can do better.

[HeavyStorm]

What machine are you running your terminals in? I have as little as 8 GB of RAM, and more CPU power than I could dream a decade ago.

Don't you think that maybe you are using your past environment to judge a current experience?

Visual Studio Code is based on Electron and works wonderfully. Doesn't feel bloated, it's quite fast to open and I haven't felt a slow down in any meaningful way.

I'm not imposing my computer specs to anyone (and I'm using vs code in a client machine in any case), but we have generally a lot more horsepower now and the discussion of performance might mean little for a desktop app (heck, we are running javascript on the server nowadays!).

[odbol_]

So, everything you do on a computer is instant? Oh, it's not? Could it be because all those little inefficiencies add up to a big slow mess when all programmers operate under the assumption "oh I have 8GB RAM all to myself, no need to write efficient code!"