> I expected gnome-terminal's memory usage to be in line with konsole (KDE's default terminal), but gnome-terminal shows remarkably well in this test
In tipical GNOME fashion, they have decided to replace this largely working piece of software with on with one that places solidly at the bottom of the article's list (ptyxis).
Almost all of that is Mesa shaders and GTK's CPU side font-cache for GL/Vulkan, compiled CSS state, FWIW.
If you run:
GSK_RENDERER=cairo ptyxis -s
You can verify that with 69,985 here RES and 52,428 of that SHR. With 5 tabs open it jumped to 71,208 here. Presumably for the encrypted scrollback pre-allocations.
You still may not choose to use it, but it should stay relatively similar the more tabs you open.
Also, it's not a core GNOME app. It's just an app I wrote for me that the distros seem to have liked for its design/platform integration.
ptyxis has a few features that gnome-terminal doesn't and which are really handy. Namely, being able to list containers running on the system and then being able to select one to get a terminal running inside the container. Not sure that warrants replacing gnome-terminal but it is really handy if you use containers a lot.
The good news is that before writing Ptyxis, I also ported GNOME Terminal to GTK 4 and doubled the performance of VTE. So you know, use whatever you like.
Today I learned (thanks to this article) that I can use timg to display images right in my standard macOS terminal, even without switching to kitty or any other fancy thing. Not pixel perfect of course, but still, much faster to go through icons or other pictures than opening in a separate Preview window. A simple "brew install timg" worked for me. Will surely save me some clicks!
I use to have a few terms active in the very early days of Linux. When I heard about screen/tmux now I just have 1 term open and multiple tmux sessions.
I think if you can get use to tmux/screen you may like that better :)
I've faced the many terminal tabs issue. In a way tmux actually makes it worse as I'm used to the running app being in the title, and tmux obscures that (now there's just "client"). But also better as I found a great session restore plugin; always drove me a bit crazy when something happened that either killed the terminal app or triggered a full restart, and my tabs were lost.
i've been using xst https://github.com/gnotclub/xst, a fork of suckless st https://st.suckless.org/ for a long period, but there's also st-flexipatch https://github.com/bakkeby/st-flexipatch available which now includes sixel support
Why not try Ghostty? https://ghostty.org
He said it: because it isn't in Debian repos.
> I expected gnome-terminal's memory usage to be in line with konsole (KDE's default terminal), but gnome-terminal shows remarkably well in this test
In tipical GNOME fashion, they have decided to replace this largely working piece of software with on with one that places solidly at the bottom of the article's list (ptyxis).
Almost all of that is Mesa shaders and GTK's CPU side font-cache for GL/Vulkan, compiled CSS state, FWIW.
If you run:
GSK_RENDERER=cairo ptyxis -s
You can verify that with 69,985 here RES and 52,428 of that SHR. With 5 tabs open it jumped to 71,208 here. Presumably for the encrypted scrollback pre-allocations.
You still may not choose to use it, but it should stay relatively similar the more tabs you open.
Also, it's not a core GNOME app. It's just an app I wrote for me that the distros seem to have liked for its design/platform integration.
ptyxis has a few features that gnome-terminal doesn't and which are really handy. Namely, being able to list containers running on the system and then being able to select one to get a terminal running inside the container. Not sure that warrants replacing gnome-terminal but it is really handy if you use containers a lot.
The good news is that before writing Ptyxis, I also ported GNOME Terminal to GTK 4 and doubled the performance of VTE. So you know, use whatever you like.
Today I learned (thanks to this article) that I can use timg to display images right in my standard macOS terminal, even without switching to kitty or any other fancy thing. Not pixel perfect of course, but still, much faster to go through icons or other pictures than opening in a separate Preview window. A simple "brew install timg" worked for me. Will surely save me some clicks!
For that specific use case you could also try `yazi`[0], which is a TUI file browser that has image (and other filetypes) preview built in.
[0] https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi
there is more to your choice of terminal emulators than pure memory usage.
https://lwn.net/Articles/749992/
https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/
Why is xfce4-terminal missing?
I use to have a few terms active in the very early days of Linux. When I heard about screen/tmux now I just have 1 term open and multiple tmux sessions.
I think if you can get use to tmux/screen you may like that better :)
I've faced the many terminal tabs issue. In a way tmux actually makes it worse as I'm used to the running app being in the title, and tmux obscures that (now there's just "client"). But also better as I found a great session restore plugin; always drove me a bit crazy when something happened that either killed the terminal app or triggered a full restart, and my tabs were lost.