MRmrob·Sep 23, 2023
Meanwhile, all GNOME-based terminals are still capped at 40fps:
https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10770
In Linux terminal emulators have the potential of being much fasterGNOME
vte
C++2017–2023
GNOME / vte
vte
Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte
2Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
207GitHub stars
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Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-01-07 01:15:14 UTC to 2023-09-23 15:33:29 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesLow latency is still available. Get a fast gaming keyboard/mouse/monitor/NVMe SSD. Use a latency-tuned kernel, e.g. with full preemption enabled. Disable swap and run a userspace OOM killer to avoid the problems this would otherwise cause. Run Xorg with compositing disabled and TearFree disabled. Disable vsync everywhere. Don't use software that caps the framerate low (e.g. terminals using libvte[0]). Turn off all UI animations.
Most software I use feels more responsive than anything from the Windows 95 era.
[0] https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10704
In Ask HN: What is your fav “I can't believe in 2022 this still doesn't work right”Some of it is deliberate:
https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543
It's another harmful effect of mobile-first design. A trivial power saving gives measurably improved battery life, but the horrible latency is ignored.
In Intel Launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lakelibvte is a major offender here. It's used in several popular terminal emulators, and it's deliberately capped at approximately 40fps[0], which means on a 60Hz display you'll sometimes get an additional frame of latency, and not even predictably because the timing is so uneven.
Set your keyboard autorepeat to 60Hz, hold down a key in a libvte-based terminal, and watch how bad it is. Now try again with xterm and see what it's supposed to be like. I can only assume the slow update is some misguided attempt at power saving.
[0] https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10547
In Terminal latency (2017)I wish I understood it enough to throw it into GDB - it looks like it uses O_TMPFILE, but I don't think that quite gives you what you want.
https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/65d67f6f814df4f4ab800898bb...
In Aminal: Golang terminal emulator from scratchNot all people are equally sensitive to graphical performance issues. The default Ubuntu terminal is capped at approximately 40fps[1]. This is deliberate and hard-coded. It's not an integer multiple of any common screen refresh rate and it looks very bad. There is no way to configure keyboard autorepeat so new input is shown with consistent timing. I consider this bad design and I'm happy that Alacritty is limited only by the monitor. But some people might never notice the timing problems in other terminals.
[1] https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/b517d20379c7a665e897f925ca... line 10685
In Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust