[nathanwh]

Alacritty being so slow is surprising to me here. I only use it on macOS, but it feels faster than kitty when I'm looking at application logs scrolling quickly across the screen. Perhaps responding to typing events has different latency than tailing a log file or listening to stdout?

[the_jeremy]

The latencies are different, and kitty is slower at this because the author doesn't care about huge output[0]:

> Some people have asked why kitty does not perform better than terminal XXX in the test of sinking large amounts of data, such as catting a large text file. The answer is because this is not a goal for kitty. kitty deliberately throttles input parsing and output rendering to minimize resource usage while still being able to sink output faster than any real world program can produce it. Reducing CPU usage, and hence battery drain while achieving instant response times and smooth scrolling to a human eye is a far more important goal.

0: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/

[aidenn0]

I use 'yes | head -n 1000000' for a throughput test, and kitty is about 5x faster than xterm and 1/3 the speed of alacritty (zutty does not appear to be packaged in my OS). It's rather unusual to see something that is held up by terminal rendering (sbcl's build process used to be, and they recommended using xterm for faster builds, so 5x faster than xterm is probably "good enough" there).

[wmf]

This sounds backwards from both an energy perspective and human factors perspective. I don't understand the throughput vs. smooth scrolling tradeoff though.