Re: BUG: gnome terminal horrible performance

[gabor <gabor z10n net>]

On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 09:12:46AM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 09:45:47AM +0200 or thereabouts, Carsten Weinberg wrote:
> 
> We can't just remove the accessibility code to speed things
> up. Or the Pango stuff because "who wants their Korean spam
> rendered correctly in a gnome-terminal anyway?" Or tabs in
> a gnome-terminal because we can all use 'screen' anyway.

-accessibility: i don't know much about it
-rendering 'exotic' languages: try mlterm which is developed
(imho) by japanese developers, or try rxvt-unicode.
both correctly render unicode text, and both are MUCH faster
than gnome-terminal. yes, i know this much faster is hard
to measure, but everyone who used gnome-term for some serious work,
(for exsample i many times code  in a maximized terminal with vim)
came to the conclusion that it is too slow.
see this bug:
http://bugs.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137864

imn my case, i had to switch from the binary-ati driver to the xfree-ati
driver to use gnome-term in an usable speed (note that in kde,
konsole worked perfectly with both ati drivers (yes,
it was a little slower with the binary one, but still faster
than the xfree-ati + gnome-term))

this is too bad...
i just cant understand why the gnome devels dont prioritize this issue.
for example, i know 2 my friends who use kde (they're programmers).
if i would recommend them to switch to gnome, i know they would immediately
switch back after they tried gnome-term ( i also switched back multiple times)

in a way i understand that the terminal is not that much needed for the
non-power user, but i hope that developers are still a target audience for gnome.

-tabs: mlterm has tab support (but non visual one..it works like screen. so you have more
virtual screens, but you don't have the notebook widget there). rxvt-unicode
does not have tab support. but imho tabs are not responsible for the slowdown
(they were  in the past, but nowadays gnome-term with 1 tab is equally slow
as gnome-term with 10tabs)
> 
> 
> If there are other gnome-terminal or vte hackers lurking
> on this list, they are welcome to suggest other things to 
> investigate as well as ORBit debugging spew. 

yes, i would also be happy to help track down the problem.
i mean i will be happy to test anything that the devels want to test.
but that bug is already there for 5months, priority:urgent
and severity:critical , and status is still NEW. :))

summary: there are other terminal apps that do all that gnome-term does
(ok, except the accessibility stuff maybe), and they do 
it a lot faster.that means that faster displaying is possible.
but (imho) the gnome-devs don't think about this problem
as a critical one. and imho that's wrong.

gabor

p.s: the standard i-am-grateful-for-all-that-the-gnome-devs-do-and 
i-understand-that-they-dont-have-time thing applies of course ;)