[flumpcakes]

I am not sure on what your commented is based on, but in short: No? High performance software needs to deal with memory, and optimisations often will need some kind of direct control - as in this example where re-using memory is more performant than constantly churning with mmap.

[sequin]

I honestly don't understand why a terminal emulator needs to be performant. Seems like peak bikeshedding to me.

[yoyohello13]

A lot of developers use the terminal as their primary interaction with the computer. Nvim, tmux, etc. Having it be fast is an extreme quality of life improvement. For devs who only ever use the terminal integrated into their ide then it’s probably less important.

[cbmuser]

Can you elaborate on that a bit, please?

I have never found myself in the situation where my terminal emulator would be too slow and I‘m using it for the majority of my day-to-day work.

I honestly never ran into a situation where I would habe blamed the terminal emulator for being too slow.

[dkdcio]

not the same person but in the flow of doing things those little pauses (tens of milliseconds) do matter. I open/close nvim (and less-so tmux) a ton, and run lots of commands per day. I don’t want to wait

and once you get used to things being that fast, it’s hard to go back (analogous to what people say about high-refresh screens/monitors)

all that said the speed of the default mac terminal (and other emulators I tried) was always fine for me, performance was not why I switched to Ghostty

[barnabee]

I think this kind of thing just bothers some people and not others.

I first started to understand and notice update rates and responsiveness as a gamer playing 1st person shooters.

I hate (ok, I find it a bit jarring) the jerky scrolling of a phone in battery save mode limited to 60(?) FPS. It’s so obviously not connected to your touch anymore.

In terminals it’s things like the responsiveness fuzzy finders and scrolling that I really notice.

I turn off animations everywhere I can.

It’s not impossible to use something slower, but when everything feels instant it’s just much more pleasant, smoother, and feels more productive as a result of the computer working at whatever speed my brain does.

[drob518]

Well, perhaps “performant” isn’t the word you should be using. All code should be performant, where performant is defined as performing at an acceptable level. You might be tempted to then ask if it needs to be ultra high performance? That’s a better question but still off the mark. The correct question is whether YOU need an ultra high performance terminal emulator? If you don’t, you’re free to not use it. I haven’t found a need for it myself, for instance, and I still use the vanilla MacOS term. But that doesn’t mean someone else hasn’t wanted a faster term than the MacOS term and I wouldn’t throw shade on them for scratching that itch, even if I don’t share it.

[RickHull]

https://ghostty.org/docs/about

> Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.

> In all categories, I am not trying to claim that Ghostty is the best (i.e. the fastest, most feature-rich, or most native). But when I set out to create Ghostty, I felt all terminals made you choose at most two of these categories. I wanted to create a terminal that was competitive in all three categories and I believe Ghostty achieves that goal.

> Before diving into the details, I also want to note that Ghostty is a passion project started by Mitchell Hashimoto (that's me!). It's something I work on in my free time and is a labor of love. Please don't forget this when interacting with the project. I'm doing my best to make something great along with the lovely contributors, but it's not a full-time job for any of us.

[homebrewer]

Scrolling and searching through megabytes of output is often useful. Sometimes you don't expect it and can't prepare for it in advance.

[syntheticnature]

You've missed all the posts where people complain about a terminal emulator taking 1ms longer to respond to a keystroke than their preferred one, haven't you?

[usertty]

I also didnt get it until I tried ghostty and saw the results of the command appear before even taking my finger off the enter key