Re: Terminal Latency

Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> writes:

Terminal Latency
================
Measuring Terminal Latency with Typometer
Posted on Mar 16 2024
>
Motivation
==========
I've been a long-time user of Xterm. I tried to switch to other
terminal emulators several times because of Xterm's broken Unicode
support, especially regarding glyphs/emojis and multi-font
substitution. These glyphs are part of many modern CLI tools and are
often printed as blank squares in Xterm. More recently, I attempted
to switch again, but every time I try, I'm discouraged by the
additional latency added during typing.

Very cool research.  Thanks for posting.

[...]

    Terminal Emulator           Min   Max   Avg  Stddev
    ----------------------     ----  ----  ----  ------
    xterm (389-1)               2.8   9.8   5.3     1.1
    alacritty (0.13.1-1)        5.2  17.8   6.9     1.8
    kitty-tuned (0.31.0-1)      8.1  16.3  10.7     1.4
    zutty (0.14-2)              7.4  16.4  11.2     1.6
    st (master 95f22c5)        11.4  17.9  14.2     1.2
    urxvt (9.31-4)             18.4  22.7  20.4     0.8
    konsole (24.02.0-1)        16.4  26.8  20.7     2.2
    kitty (0.31.0-1)           11.5  34.4  23.8     2.6
    wezterm (20230712.072601)  11.3  40.9  26.1     7.2
    gnome-terminal (3.50.1-1)  29.0  32.3  30.2     0.8
    xfce4-terminal (1.1.1-2)   28.0  36.1  30.2     1.1
    terminator (2.1.3-3)       28.7  48.0  30.5     2.0
    tilix (1.9.6-3)            28.6  69.7  31.0     4.4
    hyper (v3.4.1)             28.1  58.9  39.8     5.7
>
Xterm yields the best results, and Hyper (a web-based terminal) has
the worst results.

Hyper is an Electron-based application.  I tried using it once, but
indeed it's very slow.