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That's the state of computing in 2023: a browser disguised as a native app running 15 layers of Javascript is used as a friggin terminal. And nobody bats an eyelids, as if the utter insanity of it made any sense.
And the installer is 117M compressed. That's MEGABYTES... For a terminal!
The mind boggles...
I've been using Alacritty for the last 4 years, it's kinda the opposite of this nonsense. It's written in Rust, it's super light weight, highly optimised, and uses hardware acceleration to render the terminal. It's top of the chart for every terminal performance benchmark conceived.
However, that lightness and fastness comes at a cost. There are some basic features they just won't add because they're outside the scope of the project. Eg, tabs ("just use a tiling wm and do your own tabs in the wm") or a scrollbar ("just use a shell with a scrolling screen buffer like Tmux"), or different coloured backgrounds for each opened window ("why would anyone ever want to do that?").
My holy grail terminal would be something like Alacritty, written in Rust, blisteringly fast and light weight, but with tabs, scrollbar, bookmarks, etc.
I find myself falling back to using Konsole a lot these days, it's got all the features I want, is fast enough, and already installed on every system I use Plasma on.
I never understand the whole thing around "fast" terminals. How can a terminal be "slow"? Surely the terminal you're using has no effect on the programs you're calling, so what's being measured here?
I get what you mean, it is an interesting question to explore.
For me, it think it appeals to my obsessive engineer-brain, I am hooked on chasing efficiency.
Eg, if one tool uses 10MB ram and takes 1second to complete a task, and another tool takes 50MB ram and 5 seconds to complete the same task, then clearly I want to use the more efficient one. The other must be wasting resources, right?
When it comes to real life software and real tasks, it is a lot more complicated than that, there are hundreds of variables to take into account and compare. But if one tool stands out among the others, optimising to achieve the best number (fastest time, lowest power draw, lowest ram use, etc) in each comparable variable, then I absolutely must use that one, it would be irresponsible not to, right?
Throw hardware acceleration into the mix, and it takes the situation to a new level. Why make my poor CPU render the text on the screen 60 times per second, when I can get the GPU to do it? It's just sitting there doing nothing, and it's better at the job anyway, and as a bonus you get even lower CPU utilisation and lower ram usage.
However, as I described in my previous post, chasing these numbers can come at the cost of usability. That's the case with Alacritty, and why I will be switching to wezterm.
The very few times your programs end up spamming a ton to stdout I guess
Konsole is my second favorite terminal app. Wezterm may be your holy grail.
I am using Konsole currently, as it works best in KDE. Should I switch to Alacritty? I like to have one window and the rest in tabs, its pretty great. I guess alacritty doesnt have that right? What all does fit in the config? Konsole has tabs with special descriptors using path, host, program etc. You can change the color scheme, its pretty nice.
I swear. I quit using iTerm and moved to Kitty because it was too inefficient and was eating up my battery on the go. There are so many apps that are just diguised browsers that eat too much memory and processing power and they make needing a powerful machine a requirement if you want to have multiple apps open. It's getting to a ridiculous point and it's inconvenient.
I don't understand why desktop JS apps don't use React Native at least. It's still JavaScript but doesn't use a browser, and renders to native UI widgets. Far lighter than Electron.
Well with react native you still have to deal with the native problem which a developer doesn't want to deal with, you know... You could... But if they really cared about making the app efficient and well they would have had a different decision making process... People nowadays don't really just the right tool for the job, they just have a tool and try to turn it in a universal hammer and solve everything with it
Waiting for the "fRee rAm iS unUseD raM" comment.
Oh that one pisses me off so much... they act like its the only damn thing i have open.
Exactly, your program using the minimum of RAM allows more for other programs to run and gives more memory for the OS to cache literally anything that isnt their web app, likely the filesystem, and that is a much better use of the RAM then letting electron or some such eat it all.
The only stupid part is bundling a whole browser for a webpage. HTML5 as an executable format is fantastic - all the bullshit Java promised, except people actually use it. But for some godforsaken reason, everybody ships a platform-specific... portable OS... with every single program.
Electron and whatnot have turned "Java but good" into "Docker but awful."
From their FAQ:
Q: What shells does Wave Terminal support?
A: We currently only support bash. […]
Seems at least dishonest to advertise it as a "terminal" if it works only with a specific shell. It's okay to have extra features enabled by escape codes emitted by the shell, but if it goes beyond that, I'd say it's not just a terminal anymore.
It is a cross-platform terminal that supports only bash and only on Linux and MacOS
So, a browser frontend for bash... Nah, that sales pitch sucks (ram)
"modern", when it comes to terminals, usually translates to Javascript / web / electron
We are used to badly optimized webapps but there's some that definitely manage to be snappy wothout taking too much ressources
Ditch Vim for quick updates.
GAAAAAAAASP
^heresy^
Looks like bloat to me
I'm unsure that I would find this useful. While I might want a good solution to view web content on the terminal (with a modern, w3c standards rendering engine) so that I can do less outside of the terminal, I don't think I see the utility of using web tech to power my zsh and vim usage. I am enjoying my balance of utility and perf with kitty.
I hope you have a good experience and share your findings.
Looks like Electron. Oh boy...
I've been looking for a terminal with better bookmark support; I use mRemoteNG on windows for my RDP/SSH work, and I haven't been happy with any alternative on Linux that handles session bookmarks like that. I'm curious to try this.
the hell are terminal bookmarks?
I manage a lot of systems, so just click to open a ssh session in a new tab. I usually have shell aliases, but a bookmark that could set the title of the tab to the hostname and account for easier nav would be my goal. Being able to dynamically open tab groups too would be good, like if I have a dev/prod/SQL server for an app I could 1-click to open a group of 3 tabs
Well, there's this if you want to use it in Linux, I've used it before, liked it well enough, but not paying for it so I removed it (It's sort of crippled if run free). I personally use Konsole on KDE which works quite well. I've read and think that Konsole also allows multiple bookmarked connections. I haven't really tested it myself, I have roughly 10 machines I log into daily so I may try that further.
Before I made the leap to Linux years ago, I loved using MRemoteNG. Simply hands down the best. IMHO
I tesed the client posted here by the OP. While it looks pretty nice, it suffers the same thing as others I've tried. Nothing beats the simplicity of the plain 'ol shell in Linux or in OSX. :)
Windows Terminal has profiles that you can configure a lot so you can have SSH profiles too, don't know if that fits your use case exactly though
I just finished my perfect st build after switching from kitty. So I'm not really interested in getting something even more bloated then what I used to use.
At least they aren't going for the new user friendly marketing they were a few weeks back, as they have nothing that would of helped me as a new user a few years ago
Interesting concept, I like the design, but the workflow is rather odd and would take some getting used to. Also, things like the UI need some work on scrolling, like the Sudo connect window scrolling the password out of sight if you fail the password entry.
Is there a competitor or is that the first of its kind?
Closest I can think of is Warp, although right now it's still closed source and Mac only. If there are others I've missed I'd love to learn more!
Yeah, deal breaker :D I'm not interested in mac software
They do have Linux and Windows versions coming and claim they're going to gradually open source it so there's that, but yeah, doesn't exactly inspire that much confidence lol
Warp has discoverability features that would actually convince me of using a "modern" terminal - like instant tooltips with documentation.
That said, call it trust issues, but I'll never use a closed source terminal.
I'd like to see more user-friendly features like this that are terminal-agnostic. Manually checking manpages is so slow and fickle. Having the equivalent of an intellisense for the command line would be awesome.
Yup, I feel you. It's something I've always wanted myself, and I find myself hoping the OSS alternatives eventually implement something similar. For now I just make do with things like tealdeer and whatnot.
Edit: Just stumbled upon navi, the interactivity looks a lot closer to what we want than tldr and friends at least
there is Inshellisense
I tried it for a few minutes, but every time I hit ctrl+c it stops showing tooltips. Looks good though
I think Tabby is a similar project, but personally I spin up and throw out terminals very liberally. Tabby had a horrendous launch time, something more than a second which constantly bothered me while trying to work. I'd love to see how quick this is though!
I'm looking for a terminal like warp that's Linux compatible and this initially looked promising but the comments on how bloated it is is discouraging.
Looks interesting, I will look into it. On first look it seems useful