[SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

TheUnknowen · 2020-04-26 17:23:10

Hello!
This might seem like a strange question but I was wondering the following:

After installing a plain arch linux distro on a new system you are greeted with the standard black and white linux terminal. After installing some display server and starting some window manager plus extra terminal emulator ( lets say xterm ), this terminal emulator is of course going to behave different than the 'plain' terminal 'provided by arch linux.

What I have come to notice is that, no matter what type of terminal emulator I am trying ( xterm, st, urxvt ), I can't seem to get the same 'feeling' that I get when I use the plain terminal.
What I mean by feeling is how fast the plain one processes my inputs. Every key stroke seems to be communicated so much faster than any other emulator.

Is it only me noticing things that are not there or is there something behind this?
Can this 'speed' be achieved on other emulators with display servers as well ?

Last edited by TheUnknowen (2020-04-27 15:55:45)

eschwartz · 2020-04-26 17:56:34

"plain" terminal == just the tty?

Naturally, any display server will devote some processing time to running the display server and proxying your text through the display server. The tty is, comparatively, lightweight. I suppose lightweight things run faster. Not sure there is any more to it than that.

TheUnknowen · 2020-04-26 18:22:20

Exactly, I forgot that it's called tty.
And yeah, that's what I thought, the time to process information through a display server just takes some time. I was still curious on whether it is possible to increase 'reaction' speed.

seth · 2020-04-26 20:08:21

Either you're a bird or an insect or your hardware is incredibly weak or there's an issue w/ the config.
Entering eg. "date" should lead to instant™ output, no matter what.

If that's not the case, please post your xorg log and detail on the environment (WM, compositor, …)
If it is the case, please elaborate on the actual issue (what is slow how exactly)

TheUnknowen · 2020-04-26 20:28:02

seth wrote:

Either you're a bird or an insect or your hardware is incredibly weak or there's an issue w/ the config.
Entering eg. "date" should lead to instant™ output, no matter what.
If that's not the case, please post your xorg log and detail on the environment (WM, compositor, …)
If it is the case, please elaborate on the actual issue (what is slow how exactly)

Its not the programs but rather the things that I am typing that just seem to be shown faster in tty than they are in some other terminal emulator - it's kind of hard to explain.

eschwartz · 2020-04-26 20:31:11

It's possible the terminal emulator is laggy when registering keystrokes, yes. But this points to a general GUI input issue, not something specific to a terminal.

seth · 2020-04-26 20:37:49

seth wrote:

please post your xorg log and detail on the environment (WM, compositor, …)

dakota · 2020-04-26 20:47:35

Do you mean there is a time lag between the pressing a key and the terminal emulator displaying the result of that key press?

EDIT - too slow, I reckon.

Last edited by dakota (2020-04-26 20:48:14)

Trilby · 2020-04-26 21:24:02

I'd speculate that this could be more of an illusion rather than actual responsiveness.

Consider all the other differences. Look at the cursor in the tty and in your terminal emulator - in a vast majority of cases, they are different shape. Look at the blink of the cursor - in a vast majority of cases the terminal emulator cursor does not blink at all. Even in the cases where the terminal emulator has a blinking cursor, it is generally much slower than the blinking of the cursor in the tty.

Upbeat music might make a movie scene feel more "fast paced", so too may some of these factor influence your perception of the tty speed.

Last edited by Trilby (2020-04-26 23:33:03)

romstor · 2020-04-26 22:53:07

If you notice latency this much - your best bet locally may be something like Alacritty - ArchWiki. This is the only GPU accelerated terminal emulator that I know of. From their github page:

Alacritty is the fastest terminal emulator in existence. Using the GPU for rendering enables optimizations that simply aren't possible without it.

For remote connections give Mosh - ArchWiki a try. It uses local echo instead of waiting for response from remote on every key press. That would be the fastest you can possibly do for SSH session.

Hope these help.

eschwartz · 2020-04-26 23:02:32

Why would one wish to use a GPU-decelerated terminal emulator?

romstor · 2020-04-26 23:12:34

eschwartz wrote:

Why would one wish to use a GPU-decelerated terminal emulator?

I don't know, but 22k stars on github show that quite many do enjoy it.

jasonwryan · 2020-04-26 23:19:36

romstor wrote:

eschwartz wrote:
Why would one wish to use a GPU-decelerated terminal emulator?
I don't know, but 22k stars on github show that quite many do enjoy it.

OMZ has 109k, which goes to show that people that star github repos are generally clueless.

Trilby · 2020-04-26 23:35:58

Also note that while key press responsiveness should not be different (to any degree detectable by humans), any decent terminal emulator should be *much* faster at printing out large volumes of data as they can take advantage of various "cheats". For example, running `time cat /var/log/pacman.log` on my system under tty2 takes a hair under 4 seconds while in st under X it take 20ms. And this just happens to be a very new install just 3 months old. On my other system, the difference might be an order of magnitude greater.

EDIT: I just tested on my other system. In st in X it took 0.6s, in tty2 ... it's still going. EDIT: done at just over 90 seconds. I suppose the scale factor isn't worse, just longer all together.

Last edited by Trilby (2020-04-27 00:26:54)

romstor · 2020-04-26 23:39:38

jasonwryan wrote:

romstor wrote:
eschwartz wrote:
Why would one wish to use a GPU-decelerated terminal emulator?
I don't know, but 22k stars on github show that quite many do enjoy it.
OMZ has 109k, which goes to show that people that star github repos are generally clueless.

This is exactly why I am very careful with the choice of words here. In order to enjoy something - it doesn't have to make sense :-)

Trilby · 2020-04-26 23:43:14

But romstar, you suggested if the OP wanted low latency, allacritty might be a good choice. Was that a careful word choice? Do you think it's popularity reflects low latency?

romstor · 2020-04-27 00:03:56

Trilby wrote:

For example, running `time cat /var/log/pacman.log` on my system under tty2 takes a hair under 4 seconds while in st under X it take 20ms.

Alacritty author had a field day with these tests. Have a look!

Trilby wrote:

But romstar, you suggested if the OP wanted low latency, allacritty might be a good choice. Was that a careful word choice? Do you think it's popularity reflects low latency?

No, I was responding to specific question from eschwartz only. Github stars are a known problem, similar to "correlation does not imply causation" thing (i.e. number of stars doesn't necessarily reflect quality, usefulness or even real popularity of the software). But it is a metric that we have, and enjoying something doesn't have to obey the rigors of statistical analysis :-)

eschwartz · 2020-04-27 00:23:39

And no one noticed my joke about it being GPU-decelerated instead of "accelerated"...

Everyone always tries to shove everything onto the GPU because "omg gpu means fast". Typically, what ends up happening is it gets slower...

And quite frankly... why do you care so much about ricing how fast your terminal can scroll through large amounts of text? The actual bottleneck for running command-line programs is how long the program itself takes to run, which your choice of terminal emulator cannot influence, not how many fractions of a second it takes for you to not see 20k lines of text speeding past. For heaven's sake, use a pager.

jasonwryan · 2020-04-27 00:35:54

eschwartz wrote:

And no one noticed my joke...

No stars from me!

TheUnknowen · 2020-04-27 01:08:22

Jesus I did not expect so many to answer in such a short amount of time lol.
I tried alacritty and it did not make a difference between it and my current main terminal, st.

As I said, it's not how fast programs are processed but rather, how fast me hitting enter or tab for auto completion or scrolling through less'd files is/are processed in tty.
This does not mean that it takes long on terminal emulators - it just seems pretty much instant in tty.
It's hard for me to really pin it down to something.
I don't know how else I could describe it...

What exactly from my xorg log do you want?

I am using dwm + st, I generally like to keep it small.

loqs · 2020-04-27 01:43:48

A difference in the typematic configuration between X and the console?

TheUnknowen · 2020-04-27 02:17:22

loqs wrote:

A difference in the typematic configuration between X and the console?

Oh damn! This was exactly it.
I had to set it at around ~60Hz in order to get the same effect. Prior to this I apperently had default 25. Such a huge difference!
Thanks a bunch !

seth · 2020-04-27 06:00:06

I don't know how else I could describe it...

The terms "autorepeat" or "hold a key until it repeats" would have helped greatly…

Please always remember to mark resolved threads by editing your initial posts subject - so others will know that there's no task left, but maybe a solution to find.
Thanks.

TheUnknowen · 2020-04-27 15:56:53

seth wrote:

I don't know how else I could describe it...
The terms "autorepeat" or "hold a key until it repeats" would have helped greatly…
Please always remember to mark resolved threads by editing your initial posts subject - so others will know that there's no task left, but maybe a solution to find.
Thanks.

Marked as solved.
Indeed but it wasnt just holding a key until it repeats. Typing also felt/feels different and that's what I tried describing by writing something like 'different input' etc...

Arch Linux

#1 2020-04-26 17:23:10

[SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#2 2020-04-26 17:56:34

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#3 2020-04-26 18:22:20

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#4 2020-04-26 20:08:21

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#5 2020-04-26 20:28:02

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#6 2020-04-26 20:31:11

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#7 2020-04-26 20:37:49

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#8 2020-04-26 20:47:35

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#9 2020-04-26 21:24:02

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#10 2020-04-26 22:53:07

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#11 2020-04-26 23:02:32

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#12 2020-04-26 23:12:34

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#13 2020-04-26 23:19:36

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#14 2020-04-26 23:35:58

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#15 2020-04-26 23:39:38

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#16 2020-04-26 23:43:14

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#17 2020-04-27 00:03:56

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#18 2020-04-27 00:23:39

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#19 2020-04-27 00:35:54

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#20 2020-04-27 01:08:22

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#21 2020-04-27 01:43:48

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#22 2020-04-27 02:17:22

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#23 2020-04-27 06:00:06

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

#24 2020-04-27 15:56:53

Re: [SOLVED] Curious towards the plain arch linux shell

Board footer