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Top-level
 Today I've been visited by kchibisov (Alacritty maintainer) and we've spent several hours benchmarking terminals and editors. 😴 For this test we measured a complex drawing test from vtebench[1]. Key press fills the screen with a complex pattern. I measure the latency from the key press to seeing the pattern at the end of the screen. Foot ended up firmly ahead, followed by Kitty and Alacritty. Other terminals struggle a bit more with it. 3 comments
Moar measurements: compositors. Since for this test the key presses are slow and there's no continuous redrawing, this should boil down to the amount of work a compositor does on screen update. Un-vsynced X11 is obviously the fastest; thankfully work to add tearing flips to kernel and Wayland is ongoing. Surprised to see GNOME Shell be a bit slower than raw Mutter, especially in fullscreen, since it doesn't really do much extra there. Extra surprised GNOME X11 is faster; might be noise. You might've heard that VTE got faster in GNOME 46. But how much faster? I measured it with a hardware input latency tester! The answer is: *a lot* faster. Read all about it here: https://bxt.rs/blog/just-how-much-faster-are-the-gnome-46-terminals/ For anyone following along, this is also finally the blog post where I explain in some detail how the latency tester works and what is shown on the plots. |
Gregory's Server
Next, a more interesting test: editors. For terminal editors I used Alacritty, and I've also added the fast and the slow baselines from the previous tests.
Here Neovim and Helix in text mode are the fastest, followed by nano, which has more spread for some reason. Next we have G-T-E and Builder with quite a bit of spread (@hergertme@fosstodon.org, any idea what's going on here?), then Helix and Neovim with IDE functionality, and finally VSCode.
2 years ago VSCode was better; maybe my extension setup changed
Next, a more interesting test: editors. For terminal editors I used Alacritty, and I've also added the fast and the slow baselines from the previous tests.
Here Neovim and Helix in text mode are the fastest, followed by nano, which has more spread for some reason. Next we have G-T-E and Builder with quite a bit of spread (@hergertme@fosstodon.org, any idea what's going on here?), then Helix and Neovim with IDE functionality, and finally VSCode.