| > Of course not, for example Alacritty, which telnet and ssh are depending on system's tools, like openssh and etc. I'm not sure i follow... a terminal emulator is a display. it is basically only there to visualize your shell (i.e. bash, zsh, fish, etc). From this sentence alone it sounds more like MobaXTerm or RoyalTS than a terminal. Which is fine, but shouldn't be called a terminal emulator, as thats not what it is. > If you concerned Alacritty, you will see it also compared to rxvt, because rxvt is one of the most fast terminals. thats a very feeble argument. Alacritty is - to my knowledge - the only terminal emulator with GPU Acceleration. So yeah, if you don't have a good dedicated graphics card, you won't really get any performance improvements over the usual terminal editors which only utilize the CPU... but its just plain wrong to equate their performance. > What differentiates this from Microsoft’s new terminal? Features are listed, like coloring, folding. i'm not sure i follow here either... the coloring is set by the shell - the emulator just displays the colors. and windows terminal does support colours and folding doesnt really look like something i'd ever want to use... |
I have been developing windterm for many many years. Based on my data analytics, terminal only spend 2% of the time to show text if you use threads to separate the socket read and text display. So it doesn't matter if you use GPU or not. Of course, use GPU is a very good thing, especially it can display more smoothly and draw emoji characters correctly. But as you can see, windterm still has very high performance without GPU acceleration. GPU also has its disadvantage, most virtual machines on cloud have no GPU emulated, so you can not use Alacritty on them.
The last thing, coloring, This is why I have spent so much time creating windterm in the past many years. The emulator traditionally displays the colors from server, but you know only a few poor text has its color. So for a long time, terminals should depends ZSH or auto-color-ls plugin and etc. to provide additional colors to make text more readable.
But why do we have to endure this? Text editors have already know how to styling a code file or script and done it well for more than 40 years!
So it took me some time to implement a text editor, and then I use its styling engine to coloring the text in terminal. That's why you can see a gorgeous colorful terminal. Prompt, numbers, strings and so on all have its color while maintaining the color from server if they have.
We deserve to have a colorful world, even in terminals, is it not?