Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by AdamGibbins 2859 days ago
Both are horribly slow, seriously, try iTerm2 for a week then try Terminal - you'll then notice how much latency iTerm2 adds to basic key presses.

oh-my-zsh is also horribly slow out of box, spend some time manually configuring zsh and observe your terminals open in fractional seconds instead of multiple seconds.

6 comments

iTerm2 with the new metal renderer (only added to the stable releases recently) is as fast as Terminal. But if you want to see what a truly fast terminal can be, give Kitty a try: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

As for OMZ, yep, it includes a lot of functionality out of the box which makes it a little slow. I personally use prezto because it's quicker. Give that a try.

Kitty is OpenGL based. Apple is deprecating OpenGL in Mojave.
Deprecated just means all the bugs have been found and you can use it without fear!
I find this religion quite amusing.
You should do, it was a joke.
Yeah but it’s still gonna work. I mean they haven’t updated it in ages either.
Personally, I haven't found keypress latency to be a particular issue.

I'm familiar enough with the terminal that I generally type by rote, I don't even need to look at the terminal while typing for most common tasks.

I switched from iTerm+ohmyzsh to Terminal + fish.

It's basically exactly what I had before except I can't click on links in my terminal.

I've tried fish for a year or two but in the end I went back to zsh. I found that the differences in scripting languages were just not worth it.
My scripts are still bash scripts, I just run them with `bash somescript.sh`.
You can cmd-double click. (I don't use fish, though. But I don't think there's a way for fish to turn it off.)
Neat! It's exactly what I had before then.
Afaik Terminal.app still doesn’t support true color, let alone such things as ligatures.
I don’t know about color (never needed anything fancy that way) but Terminal has supported ligatures for at least the past macOS release or two. I use Fira Code with mine and it works exactly as expected.

iTerm2 is nice but for my usage it does too much. If there were a lite version that cut a lot of the more niche features and focused solely on speed and responsiveness I might consider it.

I use iTerm2 all the term and I can honestly say I've never given a second thought to responsiveness. What are you noticing specifically? Are you typing super fast?
My terminals stay open inbetween computer re-boots, so not really a problem? I imagine most dev-types keep terminals open all the time on their local dev machines.