Most terminal emulators are in fact slow and they can be a huge bottleneck if you run complex TUIs or workloads that print a lot of output.
Ever written a program that was extremely slow only for it to run instantly after removing your debug print statements? That’s because your terminal is slow.
Fast terminal emulators already exist, but they notably refused to add tabs/splits and overall tended to be quite janky. Ghostty merging these features may not be the most groundbreaking innovation, but a high quality piece of software that can drop-in replace something you use daily with some cool improvements is something to be excited about to me. :-)
Most terminal emulators are in fact slow and they can be a huge bottleneck if you run complex TUIs or workloads that print a lot of output.
Ever written a program that was extremely slow only for it to run instantly after removing your debug print statements? That’s because your terminal is slow.
Fast terminal emulators already exist, but they notably refused to add tabs/splits and overall tended to be quite janky. Ghostty merging these features may not be the most groundbreaking innovation, but a high quality piece of software that can drop-in replace something you use daily with some cool improvements is something to be excited about to me. :-)
Thanks, this clears things up. I didn’t know what exactly was making print IO slow.
I don’t use any complex TUIs. Pretty much everything is CLI or GUI. Which TUIs did you have in mind that were slow?
I’d like to test this soon. I’ll look for a modern TUI framework.
On slow terminals k9s can be rather sluggish when scrolling through the lists