To me, the most relevant aspect is the time it takes to open. I can't believe how slow the startup time in common linux distributions is by default, it's so annoying, by the time it opens I already forgot what I wanted to do. Alacritty has this cool feature where you only ever have to "open" a single terminal, whereas new windows can be created very efficiently with `alacritty msg create-window`, being forks of the initial window. It makes using my pc a lot more comfortable.
Foot is instant. Ghostty takes ages. I don’t know why there’s such a difference, but I can’t use anything slower than Foot now without getting annoyed.
I'm using OpenBSD with xterm, and when I use something like `time xterm -e 'sh -c "echo 1; exit"'`, it says 360ms or something. Starting it with the wm keybinds is as snappy as opening a new Firefox tab. foot and st felt as fast when I was using them.
Speed itself may not be very important, but it is a very interesting challenge in itself - to prove to yourself that you can surpass the state of the art!
IME, usually you care more about latency than throughput for normal interactions, and there is a noticeable difference between the slowest ones, and the fastest ones, but I've tried a lot of terminal emulators, and any of the ones that put some effort into performance are plenty fast enough.
However, there is one case when throughput matters: when an application has a lot of output. But then the problem isn't the speed that it displays the text, it's going by too fast to read anyway, the problem is that the application can be slowed down by blocking on writing to stdout when the buffer is full. And honestly, the best approach in that case is probably not to actually render all the text, but send most of the output straight to the scrollback buffer, and only render some of the frames.
Right? I have always just used whichever terminal came with the Linux desktop I was using at the time. If anything, the terminal is already the smallest and fastest gui app I have open.
I ask this question often in the comments when a new "blazingly fast" terminal is announced and after years of doing so, have yet to read an actually practical answer that applies to modern systems.
My guess is that some people just enjoy the process of optimizing well-understiod low-stakes graphical stuff.
the new Windows Terminal had horrendous performance when it first came out. in the aftermath of the drama surrounding that, was when I first started seeing a lot of terminal emulator projects bragging about their throughput.
Regardless of all the twitter and Github drama, it was fast enough for me, and I don't get what is the interest running HLSL shaders, pets extensions or rainbow colours on the terminal.
I'm not sure why there's so much negativity in this thread. The listed requirements were already basic table-stakes security standards. IMO, anyone not encrypting all user data at rest, requiring MFA, etc. is bush league.
Time to go and acquire necessary food stuff is not a luxury in any reasonable framing. What is the alternative, eating drive-thru every day or having Instacart deliver overpriced groceries?
I believe eating food from street vendors was the usual way for paupers until quite recently. Recall that it was common to rent a bed for a few hours and share it with someone who worked different shifts.
Indeed. And I say this as Costco member. There are lot of factors that make Costco memberships work. And a lot of people won't be able to make much benefit out of Costco membership.
I say this as someone who admires their business model and how they treat customers & employees: your typical Costco experience is drive to the suburbs, spend $500 and load up your car with nice to have food products and discretionary purchases. Poorer people cannot do any of these things.
They don't require everyone to own a car. At the very least, they can run an efficient delivery service. And there's got to be a way to make a 3 hour rental or single taxi drive once a month much cheaper than owning a car.
That’ll end up in an arms race where you refine the gibberish to be more and more believable while the crawlers get better and better at detecting poison wells. The end state is where your fake pages are so close to the real thing that humans can’t tell the difference
Humans have been refining their gibberish for centuries.
I admire your idealism that "the real thing" is coherently different from good gibberish. The poisoned version of the same article is great:
https://heydonworks.com/nonsense/poisoning-well/ (I love me some surrealism so gibberish is something I sometimes choose to input into my own model in my head).
The scary part of AI is that it shows how crappy most of the training material is.
Any physical lock can be manipulated, even the particularly high-security ones. But in practice, most locks are not even challenged because doing so requires actually walking up to the lock and trying. You can't try every physical lock in existence; but you can try every digital lock. So the effects of, say, an encryption backdoor key compromise would be far greater and far more immediate than, say, the compromise of the Travel Sentry master keys.
With physical security the state apparatus can provide physical security in the form of police and what not, as well as deterrence and punishment.
In the world of cryptography it's... a bit harder to do something similar. In the best case they can come up with a key escrow system that doesn't suck too much, force you to use it, and hopefully they don't ever get the master keys hacked and stolen or leaked. But they're not asking for key escrow. They're asking for providers to be the escrow agents or whatever worse thing they come up with.
They sort of do have that power. They have the ability to lower the max vehicle weight and eventually it gets lowered to where no real traffic can go over it. Grady talked about it in the video.
because one doesn't tend to get drunk on pie and then go beat up your wife or run over a pedestrian with your car. Is it biblical? No, but people rank sins by social impact out of habit.
I do wonder, however, whether people really have issues with perf on any terminal emulator in 2026
I’ve been living in Terminal.app / zsh / tmux / vim for 15 years and have never once thought “this is slower than I want.”