Attyx – tiny and fast GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Zig

by nicholasrq • 5 months ago

19 16 5 months ago

varispeed• 5 months ago

What is the benefit of GPU acceleration?

My biggest gripe with things that I type into is the latency from keypress to when it shows on the screen. For instance, as I type this, I can clearly see a lag. If someone could come up with getting direct realtime raw access to keyboard to ensure there is zero perceptible latency (some chips that debounce switches can add even 50ms to keypress!), that would be something I'd love to have.

bigwheels• 5 months ago

What is the benefit of GPU acceleration?

Yes, I'm also not clear on what is different between this and a PTY.

nicholasrq7• 5 months ago

every terminal emulator uses PTY internally no matter if it's GPU accelerated or not

skydhash• 5 months ago

What is the benefit of GPU acceleration?

For claude to be able to use React as an engine to render its UI.

temp0826• 5 months ago

I don't understand all the hooplah about gpu-accelerated terminals either really. If your x/compositor(/framebuffer?) is using the correct drivers, isn't it already accelerated? (I've never really used "pretty" or overly featureful terminal emulators so is this about decoration? Or actually outputting text?)

nicholasrq7• 5 months ago

it does have framebuffer of course because you need to store actual text somewhere. in this case framebuffer stores structs that contain text (char), its styles and dirtiness

all chars are rasterized into atlas (sprite, if you want) containing whatever can be printable. it's bitmap that has fixed addressable cells that renderer can pick up and apply styles to

so answering you question, it's not just outputting text, a bit more but super optimized to be really fast. i mean, visually it can be achieved by something like double-buffer so you basically just diff changes and re-render only changed cells

although, as i mentioned in another comment, in some applications CPU computations become too expensive. GPU acceleration just gives terminal snappier feel and prevent performance degradation under UI-heavy load

nicholasrq7• 5 months ago

well, for most of the applications you probably don't need it. it's like a nice to have thing. it really kicks in is when you have a highly dynamic interface (mostly TUI do this). something like btop or similar. in this case rendering on CPU becomes expensive, terminal becomes less responsive and all. GPU rendering just unlocks parallelization. your stuff is running in pty, rendered with GPU and they don't interlock

lacoolj• 5 months ago

Can you post a video of the lag you see (with the sound of your keyboard as you type)?

That sounds like hell

messe• 5 months ago

Initial commit 3 days ago.

A zig-out/bin folder committed.

CLAUDE.md in the root.

README.md full of em-dashes, as are plenty of the doc comments.

Slop.

ubercore• 5 months ago

Nobody is writing a "project structure" section by hand, and listing out the directory structure with _every file_.

nicholasrq7• 5 months ago

on that one i'm guilty, not gonna lie

nicholasrq7• 5 months ago

well, if it works, it works, right? sure requires some cleanup but i'm not saying it's super stable and all. my intention here is to bring some attention and maybe gain some feedback on what i'm building

ozgrakkurt• 5 months ago

Possibly stolen from ghostty too. Disgusting

nicholasrq7• 5 months ago

nope, fully from scratch

TheGoddessInari• 5 months ago

Aside from the AI bits, "interesting" choice to use metal on MacOS, opengl on Linux, and skip Windows entirely.

nicholasrq7• 5 months ago

i intentionally avoided windows because it's conceptually different from UNIX(-like) systems. for an early prototype like this it's just easier to manage because i share 90% of the codebase. real fork is just in the way i render things

Attyx – tiny and fast GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Zig

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