alt Hacker NewsTo me, the most relevant aspect is the time it takes to open. I can't believe how slow the startup time in common linux distributions is by default, it's so annoying, by the time it opens I already forgot what I wanted to do. Alacritty has this cool feature where you only ever have to "open" a single terminal, whereas new windows can be created very efficiently with `alacritty msg create-window`, being forks of the initial window. It makes using my pc a lot more comfortable.
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this is is not new. we have had factory model (forking the initial window) in terminal emulator since 1990s.
I'm using OpenBSD with xterm, and when I use something like `time xterm -e 'sh -c "echo 1; exit"'`, it says 360ms or something. Starting it with the wm keybinds is as snappy as opening a new Firefox tab. foot and st felt as fast when I was using them.
Also present in urxvt and kitty.
Yep, I want really fast startup too. Of the two I use:
xfce4-terminal starts utterly instantly without single instance feature.
Kitty has the single instance feature and starts instantly with it.
Foot is instant. Ghostty takes ages. I don’t know why there’s such a difference, but I can’t use anything slower than Foot now without getting annoyed.