Classically, because the terminal is a grid of equally sized characters, only a single text size was supported in terminals, with one minor exception, some characters were allowed to be rendered in...
I recently switched from alacritty to ghostty as I wanted image support as ghostty implements the kitty protocol for it. Ghostty seems as fast as alacrity to me, but with better support. It even has a tmux type replacement, although I haven’t used it as I don’t need it with sway doing that for me.
Its a bit slower than Alacritty for my use case, not massively enough, but enough to put me off. The extra functionality such as its TMUX stuff I just do not need. I think if you want a more fully featured terminal, particularly if you do a lot of code writing in the terminal, then I would pick Kitty.
I only really do quick remote editing in the console so its not important for me, and I do not want TMUX as I use a tiling WM. Terminal launch speed is particularly important to me because of this.
I haven’t tried foot yet, that is meant to be good for wayland and as I use Sway it might be better fit. I would need to get frustrated with Ghostty before I could be bothered to switch, which is what happened to me with Alacritty over image support, shallow as that sounds.
Ghostty is fast? It takes like 2 full seconds to open and I’m not even exaggerating. Kitty, Alacritty and foot take only a few microseconds to launch. I feel the same in regards to Alacritty, I’d use it as default if it had image support. For now I’m using foot.
Heres a shitty gif I made to show you how fast Ghostty, Alacritty and Konsole is on my PC, all way less than a second and I am running a ton of background crap including different 4k animated wallpapers.
Gif
Its six years old, that’s starting to get on a bit now for a processor that was never anywhere near top of the line from AMD when it was new.
I think if you are trying to bling our your desktop and not expecting it to impact performance from an older, less powerful setup then generally speaking you are going to have a bad time. You should be pitching your desktop experience based on what your hardware can handle, there are plenty of terminal options available depending on what you need, just like there are plenty of WM/DMs if you have a lower spec machine.
Having said that, it was pretty damn obvious that there something wrong with ghostty on their setup, and its misleading to say that ghostly is just bad because of that.
Ive said repeatedly that its certain to be an issue with their setup I have even provided proof that its not typical.
Its just a terminal applies to pretty much every type of application. There are lightweight WM, text editors, terminals, etc. etc. for a reason.
I can run my current setup with its 2 different animated 4k wallpapers and all the over shit I have running on my old 4800u that is only slightly slower and it consumes an insane amount of CPU at idle. Just because you can does not mean you should.
I recently switched from alacritty to ghostty as I wanted image support as ghostty implements the kitty protocol for it. Ghostty seems as fast as alacrity to me, but with better support. It even has a tmux type replacement, although I haven’t used it as I don’t need it with sway doing that for me.
Why not just use kitty? Just curious.
Its a bit slower than Alacritty for my use case, not massively enough, but enough to put me off. The extra functionality such as its TMUX stuff I just do not need. I think if you want a more fully featured terminal, particularly if you do a lot of code writing in the terminal, then I would pick Kitty.
I only really do quick remote editing in the console so its not important for me, and I do not want TMUX as I use a tiling WM. Terminal launch speed is particularly important to me because of this.
I haven’t tried foot yet, that is meant to be good for wayland and as I use Sway it might be better fit. I would need to get frustrated with Ghostty before I could be bothered to switch, which is what happened to me with Alacritty over image support, shallow as that sounds.
Ghostty is fast? It takes like 2 full seconds to open and I’m not even exaggerating. Kitty, Alacritty and foot take only a few microseconds to launch. I feel the same in regards to Alacritty, I’d use it as default if it had image support. For now I’m using foot.
Something wrong there, Ghostty is just as quick for me. Are you using an older PC?
Both load for me in milliseconds, even with fastfetch stuck in my startup.
Don’t know about old but definitely not slow. My PC has a ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3060. All terminals have a fast startup time except for Ghostty.
Yeah thats what I would call old now, lol.
There is 100% something wrong with your Ghostty.
Heres a shitty gif I made to show you how fast Ghostty, Alacritty and Konsole is on my PC, all way less than a second and I am running a ton of background crap including different 4k animated wallpapers. Gif
That’s not old, definitely not for a terminal atleast.
Its six years old, that’s starting to get on a bit now for a processor that was never anywhere near top of the line from AMD when it was new.
I think if you are trying to bling our your desktop and not expecting it to impact performance from an older, less powerful setup then generally speaking you are going to have a bad time. You should be pitching your desktop experience based on what your hardware can handle, there are plenty of terminal options available depending on what you need, just like there are plenty of WM/DMs if you have a lower spec machine.
Having said that, it was pretty damn obvious that there something wrong with ghostty on their setup, and its misleading to say that ghostly is just bad because of that.
It’s a terminal. If it’s not good enough for 3600 maybe it’s just not good. I don’t have 3600 btw.
Probably, it might be a on off issue.
Ive said repeatedly that its certain to be an issue with their setup I have even provided proof that its not typical.
Its just a terminal applies to pretty much every type of application. There are lightweight WM, text editors, terminals, etc. etc. for a reason.
I can run my current setup with its 2 different animated 4k wallpapers and all the over shit I have running on my old 4800u that is only slightly slower and it consumes an insane amount of CPU at idle. Just because you can does not mean you should.