8 comments

  • maherbeg0 minutes ago
    Great post! There are some neat tricks around completion initing that I'll have to grab. I use fish shell and have done a bunch of optimization around async git statuses too.
  • DanielHB14 minutes ago
    Am I the weird one? I usually have 3&#x2F;4 terminals open at a time and rarely open new ones. Terminal startup speed is a non-issue for me.<p>The only thing I demand to be fast on my terminal is grep reverse search (ctrl+r) and of course typing a character. But if your terminal can&#x27;t keep up with your typing speed there is something deeply wrong with it.
  • abejfehr44 minutes ago
    I&#x27;m surprised people are still using nvm, considering it&#x27;s impact on shell startup time.<p>I can&#x27;t recommend switching to mise highly enough: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mise.en.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mise.en.dev&#x2F;</a>
    • shhsshs14 minutes ago
      I use aliases that lazily load nvm when I actually want to use it. This converts the shell startup penalty into a node&#x2F;npm startup penalty.
    • vstm22 minutes ago
      I wasn&#x27;t actually aware of the impact. I measured the zsh startup time locally (with mvn active and commented out) and it indeed makes a difference (.39s -&gt; .08s). Not that I would have noticed that without measuring :) - yes I&#x27;m an old geezer.<p>Thank you for the recommendation, I might then also be able to ditch sdkman as well.
  • z3ugma3 minutes ago
    Follow up &#x2F; errata post written by the author today: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mijndertstuij.nl&#x2F;posts&#x2F;what-i-got-wrong-about-fast-terminals&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mijndertstuij.nl&#x2F;posts&#x2F;what-i-got-wrong-about-fast-t...</a>
  • fg13738 minutes ago
    Life is too short to waste time on things that don&#x27;t matter.
    • binaryturtle13 minutes ago
      Maybe I should remove the following bit of code from my profile?<p><pre><code> if [ &quot;$SESSION_TYPE&quot; != &#x27;remote&#x2F;ssh&#x27; ]; then if [ &quot;${TERM_PROGRAM}&quot; != &#x27;tmux&#x27; ]; then ( if [ $[RANDOM % 10] == &quot;0&quot; ]; then fortune -n 40 -s; else echo &quot;Hi, $(whoami)!&quot;; fi ) | cowsay | lolcat &amp;&amp; printf &#x27;\n&#x27; else if [ &quot;${TMUX_PANE}&quot; == &#x27;%0&#x27; ]; then fortune | cowsay -f small | lolcat &amp;&amp; printf &#x27;\n&#x27; fi fi fi </code></pre> It&#x27;s a whole chain of interpreters firing up (sub-shells, Perl for the cow, Ruby for the lol, I think.) :D<p>But what would life be without a little bit of fun?
    • titzer6 minutes ago
      &quot;I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around and don&#x27;t let anybody tell you any different.&quot;<p>— Kurt Vonnegut
  • VladVladikoff29 minutes ago
    Speaking of slow, what I absolutely cannot comprehend is why ghostty is so popular. Despite being written in Zig it is very slow and a total CPU and memory hog. Just sitting there idle it’s pulling a constant 40% of my CPU? No thanks!
    • Analemma_4 minutes ago
      I suspect you enabled some weird setting that you&#x27;ve forgotten about. ghostty isn&#x27;t unimaginably fast but it&#x27;s faster than iTerm 2 which is plenty. And I&#x27;m sitting here with a lengthy Claude Code session open, as well as a couple tabs for my docker container and dev servers, and its idle CPU usage is 0.0%.
    • liveoneggs15 minutes ago
      My ghostty is using 0.4$ - 2.5%?
    • esseph18 minutes ago
      &gt; Just sitting there idle it’s pulling a constant 40% of my CPU? No thanks!<p>You need to figure out what is going on because that certainly isn&#x27;t normal.<p>Literally seeing 0.0% on Linux
  • frollogaston31 minutes ago
    30ms is pretty slow<p><pre><code> $ for i in {1..5}; do &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;time zsh -i -c exit; done 0.01 real 0.00 user 0.00 sys 0.01 real 0.00 user 0.00 sys 0.00 real 0.00 user 0.00 sys 0.00 real 0.00 user 0.00 sys 0.00 real 0.00 user 0.00 sys</code></pre>
  • zeflonex22 days ago
    Life is too short for a terminal period<p>I really dont get the hype around terminal tools<p>Most of the time the GUI experience is the same or better than terminal tools
    • hatradiowigwam45 minutes ago
      &gt; Most of the time the GUI experience is the same or better than terminal tools<p>I started to take your comment seriously until that line. You&#x27;re avoiding leveling up and learning how to use the CLI. Whatever reason you are avoiding it for, understand that&#x27;s what is at play here.
      • wang_li6 minutes ago
        If what a person does during the day is mainly interacting with text then they need a tool for working well with text. Possibly this is an editor window inside an IDE. Possibly this is a shell in a terminal emulator. However, dismissing GUIs out of hand and asserting superiority of CLI is wrong. Far more disciplines need a GUI to get maximum utility from their computers than can get by with a CLI. Designers, architects, actual engineers, artists, lawyers, etc.
    • utopiah51 minutes ago
      If you haven&#x27;t combined terminal tools together then you haven&#x27;t use the terminal the way it&#x27;s intended.<p>If you start 1 command and get 1 output, the terminal isn&#x27;t particularly powerful.<p>One you do start combining commands then it&#x27;s a totally different thing.<p>If your GUI does everything you need, then a terminal isn&#x27;t necessarily useful. If your GUI doesn&#x27;t provide a feature though, you are most likely stuck. You might be able to learn it&#x27;s own API in a specific language, e.g. Lisp for Gimp, Python for Blender, etc. If though your terminal application doesn&#x27;t provide what you need you can pipe its output to another terminal application and thus get something that none of those applications individual can. Once you have done it with 2 applications you can do that with 3, 4, etc. You can label those applications and re-use that tomorrow, share with someone else, etc.<p>The terminal isn&#x27;t about starting one application.
    • brudgers1 day ago
      In a Turing machine theory, a GUI application can do all the same things a terminal application can do.<p>In practical design, GUI applications inevitably deprecate keyboard abstractions in favor of graphical abstractions and graphical abstractions require parsing visual representations and are less conducive to &quot;muscle memory&quot; whenever pointer control is relative rather than absolute (which these days is approximately always [1]).<p>Keyboard oriented applications feel more like a language and human brains tend to map well to language and touch typing while GUI&#x27;s rely on something akin (or identical) to hand-eye coordination. Hand-eye coordination is harder than touch typing and every GUI application requires developing a unique mental model.<p>[1] in the ancient days of digitizing tablets with absolute coordinates, it was possible to &quot;touch mouse.&quot; But that&#x27;s not how we do things today (and it would not work well with infinite scrolling, etc.)
      • doubled1121 day ago
        I happily used a small Wacom graphics tablet as a mouse for a long time. Thanks for the memories, I’d nearly forgotten.
    • alfonsodev24 minutes ago
      a hype that lasts since the 70s can it be called a hype ?
    • hilariously52 minutes ago
      All other things being equal, GUI apps are not usually composable - the unix philosophy lets you do a lot by not solving every problem yourself.
    • johng2 days ago
      Depends on what you grew up on&#x2F;learned I think. CLI was the only thing around when I learned so that&#x27;s still what I prefer. It&#x27;s one of those things where I think you use the tool that you are proficient with. No right or wrong, just different strokes for different folks.
      • bee_rider5 minutes ago
        I think, for folks who grew up in the early 2000’s at least, CLI is the way to go forward. The GUIs at the time were really quite good, it was after the really limited time of the 90’s, but before we started dumbing down GUIs for… I dunno, style I guess.<p>If you were raised on programs where most of the features were accessible at a button-click, without going through a bunch of hamburgers, modern GUIs won’t feel familiar, CLI will.
    • liveoneggs13 minutes ago
      it&#x27;s common as a junior to think in such a way
    • johnthescott1 day ago
      &quot;gui&quot;? what gui?<p>my take is terminal is just quicker than &quot;gui&quot;.
    • otikik39 minutes ago
      echo $bait &gt; &#x2F;dev&#x2F;null 2&gt;&amp;1
    • throw123456789135 minutes ago
      Meh. I take typing commands in the terminal over clicking stuff with a mouse and learning keyboard shortcuts for every app.
    • msla49 minutes ago
      GUIs are almost entirely non-scriptable. Some exceptions exist, but they&#x27;re few and extremely limited compared to what you can do with a CLI. (Note I said CLI. A TUI is almost always a GUI made of text, and is just as non-scriptable.)
    • dismalaf1 day ago
      Terminal tools are nice because keyboard shortcuts and text commands are quicker than clicking through menus and pressing buttons. For certain types of work (programming for example) this is much quicker and more comfortable than GUI interfaces.<p>Of course, other tasks are nicer with a GUI and&#x2F;or mouse&#x2F;tablet&#x2F;touchscreen (art creation for example).