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Regarding terminal emulators, I believe that by “fast” people usually mean “low latency” instead of “high throughput”. Apparently alacritty has a good performance on thoughtput according its benchmark with vtebench, but it does not provide good latency performance according to [0].
[0] https://danluu.com/term-latency/
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That reference is pretty old at this point, especially considering that some of those terminal emulators were very young projects still. I would search for new results before making a statement about performance.
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Doesn’t it feel sketchy to run a terminal that isn’t even packaged by Debian? I run a few non-packaged things, but I don’t want my terminal, or shell, or kernel to be “some code from a some person on github”.
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I use urxvtd and LOVE it. It’s blissfully fast with a smaller memory footprint than anything else I’ve tried.
edit: I should have mentioned, having the minimal overhead and most responsive terminal is a “tier 1” priority for me.
Urxvtd is the fastest, and lightest weight terminal period.
Either that, or something has changed since I spent a long time picking it.
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Most distro-default/DE-default terminal emulators don’t really make you do ‘more’ than just have a base terminal emulator. The extra stuff (in the likes of gnome-terminal for example) only surfaces when you actually use it, except for when you have duplicate key binds. If you don’t use a DE, or don’t like Qt/GTK based engines, urxvt and xterm are the best remaining options.
Zutty is an option if you don’t mind trying (often) unpackaged software, but then st would fit as well with the performance difference being that Zutty leverages GPU rendering for more performance and st doesn’t seem to do that by itself.
If graphics isn’t your thing and you’re just on the frame buffer directly, there is fbterm.
A lot of the ‘advertised’ emulators seem to be targeting aesthetic and ‘cool’ marketability, some are even based on electron or try to put filters on the output…
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In some sense it’s not a good terminal emulator (I hit several glitches in it on macOS, though it seems to do better on my NixOS machine), but I’m in love with cool-retro-term for its gorgeous CRT-style visuals.
https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
I mention it because it doesn’t have tabs, saved sessions, or any of the other features tmux handles.
So, it’s not a bad fit for heavy tmux users.
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Unsure what you consider as “good color support” but you might want to look at the original (xterm) or at rxvt.
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A terminal emulator is a high-value large attack surface that any hacker worth his salt would love to get into the supply chain. Therefore, unless your Unix machines are toys, it’s a good idea to stick to reputable and well-maintained software, and for me that means what’s in the distro’s default repos. Every time you add third-party gunk you open yourself up to exploits from God knows where.
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Konsole is faster than Alacritty, but much easier to configure.
uxterm is the fastest.
Latency in milliseconds
Program mean std min 90% max
uxterm 1.7 0.3 0.7 2 2.4
mlterm 1.8 0.3 0.7 2.2 2.5
Konsole 13.4 1.2 11.5 15 16.1
Alacritty 15.1 1.2 12.8 15.9 26.3
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Yeah I used to use alacritty with the ligature patch, but swapped to wezterm as it supports ligatures natively. It’s fast enough, maybe not as fast as alacrity or kitty.
I just don’t use the built in multiplexer or whatever.
I think if you’re running tmux, a lot of kitty/alacrity’s performance is mooted anyway?
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