Zutty: Zero-cost Unicode Teletype, high-end terminal for low-end systems

https://git.hq.sig7.se/zutty.git

by klaussilveira • 10 months ago

72 22 10 months ago

git.hq.sig7.se

frfl• 10 months ago

The source code is locked behind a login though. Is that intentional?

Edit: just the web view is locked. Read the homepage, it tells you how to access the code (be respectful though, don't hug the site to death)

nine_k• 10 months ago

In short: it's a terminal emulator where rendering is completely run by GL ES compute shaders. It allows for GPU-accelerated performance on low-end SBCs.

Said to be very stable, runs for months, compliant enough to run Emacs with mouse support.

ComputerGuru• 10 months ago

I’ve used this but it made my laptop spontaneously reboot a few times (or was it a hard lockup that necessitated a reboot)? I liked it but ended up putting it away.

Dual GPU nvidia and integrated Intel, was running the latest Ubuntu LTS at the time with all updates.

keyle2• 10 months ago

eek what? That shouldn't happen on a modern OS, unless the cpu spiked so hot the computer decided the best course is a reboot.

Typically it's a RAM issue, or power stability issue or a graphics card issue/firmware causing instant reboots

adastra22• 10 months ago

Unfortunately, it often does. I've run into this on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware.

LoganDark2• 10 months ago

That shouldn't happen on a modern OS

They're running Ubuntu.

odc• 10 months ago

And that's why it is best to avoid GPU-acceleration unless you truly need it.

GPU drivers have always been full of bugs and will always be, since modern GPUs are ridiculously complex and designed for speed rather than reliability.

9front• 10 months ago

Homepage: https://tomscii.sig7.se/zutty/

aragilar• 10 months ago

https://tomscii.sig7.se/2020/12/A-totally-biased-comparison-... is also useful as a comparison piece.

klaussilveira3• 10 months ago

This is also great: https://tomscii.sig7.se/2021/01/Typing-latency-of-Zutty

The typing latency on zutty is the biggest feature for me. Everything feels snappy.

ggm• 10 months ago

sadly, not an ASR33 teletype emulator. I miss my teletype, it got broken in an office move. chonka-chonka-chonka-chonka-chonka-chonka----chonka TING

bawolff• 10 months ago

It kind of seems weird to put unicode in the name but not support astral characters, combining characters or bidi.

I understand these things are complicated for terminals but its weird to so thoroughly emphasize unicode and then not do a significant portion of unicode.

nxobject• 10 months ago

Looks like it's due to fundamental limitations – there's a one-to-one mapping between cells and Unicode code points, and glyphs are blitted from a pre-rendered atlas. (It's very Shadertoy-like.)

I agree it's an awkward situation: ye olde xterm and rxvt can render emoji outside of the BMP, while zutty doesn't seem to be able to.

The documentation is a pleasure to read, though.

JdeBP2• 10 months ago

My terminal emulator has that mapping (because it is designed to be a workalike for kernel terminal emulators that have that mapping). It quite happily supports the other planes. There is no actual fundamental limitation here.

Even with the one-codepoint-per-cell model, what planes one can cover is simply a matter of whether an integer is 16-bit or 24-bit/32-bit. In the Zutty code, it's a 16-bit integer, and I suspect that that is a knock-on effect of the particular way that it flattens fonts out and maps code points to glyph bitmaps, which isn't the only way that one could do that.

zizzencs• 10 months ago

I can pronounce the name of this software correctly. Now that's something I guess.

https://tomscii.sig7.se/zutty/wiki/FAQ.html#How%20do%20I%20c...

JdeBP2• 10 months ago

It probably will not catch on, I suspect. Wiktionary lacks the word completely, it appears, not even its Hungarian flavour having it, giving an indication of how obscure it is going to be when non-native speakers try to look it up.

* https://hu.wiktionary.org/wiki/zutty

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Hungarian_words_Z

Francophones are going to be thinking of something else. (-:

* https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/zut

ckbkr102• 10 months ago

My workday is 95% terminal, I work on a company managed windows 11 machine using git-scm as an easily updateable min-gw environment. A git-bash has been my configurable linux terminal on windows.

Why would one need a gpu accelerated terminal? What's the use case here?

I mean, I've worked on connections offering a an mbit of throughput. That was enough for the kind of work I'm doing.

I really do not understand what this is for, can someone enlighten me please?

klaussilveira3• 10 months ago

Well, in the age of 3440x1440 displays and retina, you are forced to render high-quality fonts, not just bitmaps. In order to do that well, and fast enough, you need the GPU.

Font rendering is hard:

https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/

https://behdad.org/text2024/

So much that Slug is a thing:

https://sluglibrary.com/

ckbkr102• 10 months ago

I see. I'm still holding on to my 3:4 aspect ratio EIZOs as second screen just because I prefer having a smaller second screen instead of 2 huge widescreens.

Opting into anything higher than 1920x1080 seems uncomfortable for me.

Maybe I just get old. I find it hard to read fonts on higher resolutions and it seems like other people do as well..

16pt Lucida Console on 1920x1080 just works way too well for me to even consider switching to anything else.

Zutty: Zero-cost Unicode Teletype, high-end terminal for low-end systems

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