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commandersakiyesterday at 5:58 AM5 repliesview on HN

Are we really quibbling over 400ms startup delay to open a new terminal?


Replies

ahofmannyesterday at 6:09 AM

Yes! The very famous xz hack was only found, because a German wondered why his ssh session lagged 200 ms at the start. Everyone should go mad when their main tool lags a few hundred milliseconds. It is unacceptable that we sit on machines, that run billions of calculations per second and our software still lags.

xboxnolifesyesterday at 4:59 PM

400ms is a ton if you have a terminal centric workflow with short lived shells.

HN has gone on a decade long crusade against Electron, of course 400ms is a lot.

neuralfogyesterday at 8:30 AM

Yes, and hundreds of developers just spent 5 minutes reading about it.

This investment makes sense for OP who opens hundreds of terminal sessions, but does it make sense to bother about 1s delay when they start the terminal session once in a while? I have several sessions opened all the time, the last time I wasted my 1s on zsh was in 2025 when I rebooted my machine due to a nvidia drivers update.

nomelyesterday at 6:03 AM

Of course. We're nerds. You should have seen the passionate discourse, a couple days ago, for Brave browser saving 45MB of memory!

theodricyesterday at 6:12 AM

400ms here, 400ms there, and before you know it, you're dead. I've switched terminal emulator and upgraded computers for less.