Re: scroll speed - emacs vs. xterm vs. rxvt

[Wayne Throop]

: Alexander Sirotkin <demiurg@ti.com>
: I've noticed that compilation time greatly depends on a terminal you
: run it in, at least for one particular project which prints lots of
: information during build process.  When I redirect it to a file it
: speeds the compilation time by 30% and when it's run in a terminal
: (konsole or gnome-terminal) top shows that X+terminal consumes about
: 20% CPU load. 
: 
: I decided to compare different terminals in terms of scroll speed, and
: here is what I found :
: 
: rxvt : 1 xterm : 2.4 konsole : 6 gnome-terminal : 11 emacs : 42
: 
: Meaning that for instance rxvt is 42 times faster than emacs. 
: 
: Well...  actually I don't know what to add, these results look pretty
: bad to me.  It means that I will never compile in emacs window and
: should abandon all terminals except for rxvt. 

Is that with the tested app iconized, or does that count the constant
X screen updates?  What you want for such displays is something that
does really exagerated jumpscrolling; you could write a tcl/tk script
that'd do the trick, ie, be a VERY dumb terminal, but with a more
efficient display of high speed spewed text.  Hrm... the scripts I
have on my shelf just handle output and display, though; not things
like typing inputs, interupts, etc.  Ah well.

I guess the point is that the above example apps are all oriented to
doing characer-by-character updates with low latency, instead of to
monitoring the growing tip of a spewed stream of data with relatively
little interaction.   Well... emacs shows more poorly than I'd expect
for that reason alone, but still...


Wayne Throop   throopw@sheol.org   http://sheol.org/throopw