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by sebtron 34 days ago
> I expected gnome-terminal's memory usage to be in line with konsole (KDE's default terminal), but gnome-terminal shows remarkably well in this test

In tipical GNOME fashion, they have decided to replace this largely working piece of software with on with one that places solidly at the bottom of the article's list (ptyxis).

3 comments

Almost all of that is Mesa shaders and GTK's CPU side font-cache for GL/Vulkan, compiled CSS state, FWIW.

If you run:

GSK_RENDERER=cairo ptyxis -s

You can verify that with 69,985 here RES and 52,428 of that SHR. With 5 tabs open it jumped to 71,208 here. Presumably for the encrypted scrollback pre-allocations.

You still may not choose to use it, but it should stay relatively similar the more tabs you open.

Also, it's not a core GNOME app. It's just an app I wrote for me that the distros seem to have liked for its design/platform integration.

Thanks for writing it! I was very skeptical initially, but after using it I'm a fan. I also appreciate that I can script settings using gsettings, so I can configure it easily on new systems without having to touch the GUI (though the GUI settings are well thought out and nice to use when you don't know what you need yet).
ptyxis has a few features that gnome-terminal doesn't and which are really handy. Namely, being able to list containers running on the system and then being able to select one to get a terminal running inside the container. Not sure that warrants replacing gnome-terminal but it is really handy if you use containers a lot.
The good news is that before writing Ptyxis, I also ported GNOME Terminal to GTK 4 and doubled the performance of VTE. So you know, use whatever you like.
Hey thanks for your work, I’m really enjoying Ptyxis on Arch.
Cool, but can you set the colors?
Wait, what? ptyxis is not the default GNOME termjnal. It is the terminal of choice for both Ubuntu and Fedora, but the default terminal in GNOME is Console, internally known as kgx: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Terminal.
Gnome Console seems to be intended for people who don't use terminals. I quickly install GNOME terminal for real use.
I was using GNOME Console in a postmarketOS install in my Chromebook. The fact that it is lightweight compared to say Ghostty (my main terminal everywhere else) made a difference in performance for such a constraint device.

And I didn't really miss any features to be honest, it has the basic that you expect (things like tabs). It is less customizable than other options, but the defaults were good enough for me.

I did not know about this. I used it on Fedora, and I thought Fedora was as close to "default GNOME" as possible.