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Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin

36 pointsby droidjjyesterday at 10:07 PM18 commentsview on HN

Comments

tdecktoday at 5:11 AM

Without all thw unnecessary headings, "color", and constant "Let. That. Sink. In."-esque recaps this would be 2 paragraphs. Just let it be! Readers don't need the slop.

exabrialtoday at 3:08 AM

All the stupid spinners at the prompt are obnoxious. Unfortunately it’s so trendy it’s impossible to reverse course

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bsdertoday at 4:54 AM

The issue isn't the terminal. The issue seems to be that Claude is using React to render to that terminal at 60FPS like a goddamn video game

Vibe coding is soooo awesome!

And people thought that Electron was a resource pig. You ain't seen nothing yet.

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anthktoday at 6:53 AM

>Zaragoza, Hotel Pilar Plaza café.

I won't use neither Claude, nor a MacBook; I would just keep chilling out programming with decent tools and a bare XTerm to accomplish the rest. I can get Aragonese bricks ^U sweets in the meanwhile.

On Terminal.app, I wonder if the GNUStep eversion and the ones bundled with Mac OSX shared some code.

leephillipstoday at 4:09 AM

I don’t use MacOS or Claude Code, but I do use Kitty terminal on Linux, which the author suggests has the same issues that plague him using Ghostty.

Kitty is a magnificent piece of software that has radically enhanced the interface between me and my computer. And it does this while consuming negligible resources.

Computer0yesterday at 10:12 PM

I don't know that I have ever understood a reason to leave the native terminal included with any given OS, particularly after the Windows modernization pass in recent years on the terminal.

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goodmythicaltoday at 12:08 AM

My terminal is not burning battery anywhere at all like mining bitcoin, and neither is yours.

If you're not benefitting from the ability to offload your terminal rendering to GPU, why are you using a terminal that offloads terminal rendering to GPU in the first place?

Imagine running something massively CPU bound, but you've still got to spin up perhaps tens of terminals in order to simultaneously ssh in to multiple servers because you don't want to set up a remote monitoring solution because you don't want each of the servers to be running a docker image where SSH>htop would suffice.

There are plenty of situations in which one might want a terminal emulator offloaded to gpu. That you are not in any of those situations is no reason to write a hit piece throwing shade as if the packages mentioned are somehow bloated or inefficient.

Imagine whining about how you've got to pay adobe and use several gigabytes of ram to resize jpgs. You'd obviously be outside Photoshop's ideal customer profile, just as you are outside ghostty et al's.