[EPILEPSY WARNING] How fast should an unoptimized terminal run?

What Hacker News said

Strong rec dmitriid · 2021-07 · on “Apple and Intel first to use TSMC 3nm”

As luck would have it, here's the continuation to Windows Terminal. Casey Muratori made a reference terminal renderer: [LINK] This uses all the constraints that the Windows terminal team cited as excuses: it uses Windows subsystems etc. One person, 3k lines of code, it runs 100x the speed of Windows terminal. See the epic demo (and stay till the end for color output): [this video]

Strong rec dundarious · 2022-05 · on “Windows Terminal Source Code”

Worth watching Casey Muratori's series of videos on terminals, and how to implement them, where he often makes specific comparison to Windows Terminal. He has some specific criticisms that are easy to disagree with, but the vast majority are well warranted. His broader series of videos on the topic are even worthwhile from a purely "software engineering education" standpoint. [this video] I feel a bit bad about posting comments about it relatively frequently on HN, but it's just so very very good, and snark aside, his perspective is extremely valuable.

Recommends dundarious · 2021-10 · on “Microsoft: Extremely slow performance when processing virtual terminal sequences”

With some limitations that I can’t remember, that I believe were minor and not insurmountable, Casey actually implemented a windows terminal with the “PhD” level work mentioned in this issue. He showcases it here. [this video] I watched it months ago, but from memory, I believe: - it has better Unicode/layout support than windows-terminal - it renders as fast as promised - it has a tiny code base

Recommends djoldman · 2022-05 · on “When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"”

Link to dev's presentation of their implementation that seems to run circles around microsoft's terminal: [this video]

Recommends jiggawatts · 2022-09 · on “Why modern software is slow”

Oh, this is nothing . Windows force-updated my Notepad.exe to the new modern UI version. It is very visibly laggy for basic actions such as opening menus or scrolling through text. You have to be spectacularly bad at programming to make something so basic so slow in 2022 on a very high-end gaming computer. Not just bad, but utterly oblivious. Casey Muratori excoriated the Windows Terminal dev team for failing to achieve a consistent 60 fps when displaying fixed-width text, which is such a trivial exercise that Casey whipped up a demo in like two weekends. [1] Now the Notepad team insisted on following in the Windows Terminal team's footprints and slowing down the other fixed-width text app t

Recommends surprisetalk · 2023-11 · on “Compressing Codebase Collocates”

Author here. It is very implausible :) After watching an inspiring video on terminal optimization [1], I started doing some napkin math on how fast my ex-employers' programs "should" run and how many resources they "should" take up. With my very small sample size (N=5), those numbers definitely hold. My big untested assumption is that most startups have even worse codebases than what I've experienced in my short tenure haha. I'd be curious what an "average" startup could achieve in 6 weeks. [1] [this video]

Recommends jiggawatts · 2024-05 · on “Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?”

Casey Muratori has some great YouTube videos (a.k.a.: rants) about the end-user visible performance degradation over the last two decades despite computers becoming 10-100x faster by various metrics. E.g.: Visual Studio Rant [LINK] How fast should an unoptimized terminal run? [this video] The root cause is that Microsoft simply doesn't have performance as a priority. It's not a KPI for (almost) anyone, certainly nobody in the desktop teams. Upper management doesn't prioritize input latency over telemetry or advertising "features". It's that simple. There's no pressure, no rejection of slow code, no metrics, no pride in good engineering. If it barely functions, it's good enough to ship.[1] Microso

Recommends jodrellblank · 2025-07 · on “Fast”

It's well known, but this video[1] is a proof of concept demonstration from 4 years ago, Casey Muratori called out Microsoft's new Windows Terminal for slow performance and people argued that it wasn't possible, practical, or maintainable to make a faster terminal and that his claims of "thousands of frames per second" were hyperbolic, and one person said it would be a "PHD level research project". In response, Casey spent <1 week making RefTerm, a skeleton proto-terminal with the same constraints Microsoft people had - using Windows APIs for things, using DirectDraw with GPU rendering, handling terminal escape codes, colours, blinking, custom fonts, missing font character fallback, line wra