
It’s a lot more user friendly and works better on macOS than the others. While it’s behind the rest of the pack, its features are strongly growing on me. ITerm2’s GPU latency was something I was curious about, as most of the benchmarks I found made no mention of it. The issues are one thing, but I have the impression that the issues won’t get fixed, attempts from other people to fix them will get denied, and new exciting issues might crop up later and receive the same treatment. And kitty doesn’t remember window position on macOS. Saying that people are “ stagnating the terminal ecosystem” because they need tmux support is a bit much. While kitty is the fastest, and I like a lot of its features, I’m leaning against using it because of the maintainer’s attitude towards tmux and other issues. I’m impressed with how fast kitty is, it’s tied with Sublime Text on input latency while running Vim. cool-retro-term - I threw this one in for kicks.

I bypassed my USB hub and connected my keyboard directly to the MBP with no discernible difference in results.
#Alacritty wsl2 update#
It takes 16ms to draw a full frame on a 4k 60hz display from top to bottom, and things in the exact vertical middle of the display update in 8ms. I have no way to verify the above numbers, they’re based on a couple sources online, links below. It sits in clamshell mode while hooked up to two 4k 60Hz monitors over USB-C DisplayPort.
#Alacritty wsl2 pro#
I’m running macOS 12.4 Monterey on a 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro CPU and 16GB of RAM. I also tested the graphical text editors I have installed, as I was curious to see if Vim could beat Sublime Text in input latency. The bulk of my time spent in the terminal is text editing, so each terminal in the test ran Vim. These are the settings I used, from the docs: # 150~ FPS for MBP display (untested)

I tuned kitty’s performance and ran a separate test, labeled “ kitty - unlimited”. Font ligatures are on by default in WezTerm, but disabled in iTerm2. I added Meslo as a backup font to iTerm2 to support all the icons my CLI apps use.

Some of the terminals had custom fonts and icons loaded, such as Meslo in Terminal.app, and JetBrains Mono in the others. I set the size of the terminals at 90x30 columns/rows, and I placed them as close to the vertical middle of the display as possible. I’m not trying to find the fastest vanilla terminal, I’m trying to find the best balance of performance and features. When setting things up for testing, I used the same setup I would use every day, which means custom fonts, themes, and editor plugins. It’s close enough for my use, but I encourage you to take your own measurements. When setting the output marker in IIS, I waited for the screen to completely finish drawing the typed character and the new position of the cursor, to account for input latency and pixel response time.īecause of these variables, and other things unique to my setup, this data is not accurate. I think it’s because it was hard to see when the key was fully pressed. Some of the videos had some impossible delays, so I had filter out the bad ones and use the data that was closer to what I was expecting.įor example, Terminal.app showed a whopping 800ms delay during my first measurement, but later measurements were within a 10ms deviation of the result portrayed here. I took 2-3 videos of each app and selected input/output markers in IIS. I used Is It Snappy? (IIS) for iOS to take slow-motion videos of the screen while pressing keys on my keyboard. I’ll come back to that later in the post. Unable to pick between them, I decided to benchmark their input latency to aid my decision-making, though I’m still not sure what to use. I ended up with 3 emulators that I liked: WezTerm, iTerm2, and kitty. When installing it, I found out that Terminal.app doesn’t support 24-bit color, which led me on a wild rabbit hole of discovery for a new terminal emulator that supported 24-bit color and didn’t suck.

I am using the Ayu theme for fish and Vim. When tuned, kitty is twice as fast as the latter two, and tied with Sublime Text. Terminal.app and WezTerm follow closely behind, and kitty has a small lead over Alacritty and iTerm2. Out of the six terminal apps I tested on macOS, kitty has the lowest input latency at 29.2ms. Measuring terminal latency - Luke's Wild Website
