[GuB-42]

People writing fast terminal emulator care about throughput, latency and resource utilization. Kitty for instance deliberately limit throughput to keep both latency and CPU/GPU usage reasonable.

Also, by what metric is xterm so fast? I accept the idea that it is fast, even the fastest, but "a lot" seems suspicious to me. From the keyboard to the monitor, there is a lot of hardware and driver latency, I guess tens of milliseconds, so the effect of the terminal, should be relatively minor. I suspect xterm is so fast because the tool used to test it relies on the X server, and because xterm communicates with X directly, the latency will be really low from the point of view of X, but how is it end-to-end? Do we get the same results, with, say, Wayland?

[eviks]

here is some latency tests using an external camera, though that's Windows only, there might've been a similar one for Linux, but not sure

https://chadaustin.me/2024/02/windows-terminal-latency/

The other one where xterm is uber low is https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/ is using this tool with software-based screen capture https://pavelfatin.com/typometer/, not sure how reliable that is as a proxy for end-to-end (at the time of the benchmark Wayland wasn't supported)