Tomscii writes about terminal emulators, including his own Zutty, plus electronics projects like a lab power supply and OpenBSD on a laptop.
Commenters like Zutty for its low typing latency and features, and also praise his lab power supply article and terminal comparison pieces.
I like the focus on simplicity of uMon, and agree with author's criticism of behemoths like Grafana.
But looking at the installation instructions[1], I can't help but think that their reluctance to use Docker feels contrarian for no reason (and the quip about it being "out of fashion" completely misguided). This whole procedure could be automated in a Dockerfile, and actually running uMon would be vastly simplified. Docker itself is not much more than a wrapper around Linux primitives, and if they dislike it specifically for e.g. having to run a server and run containers as root, there are plenty of other lighterweight container alternatives.
There's an argument to be made that the "Simple" Network Management Protocol they're a fan of is far from being simple either[2]. Configuring the security features of v3 is not a simple task, and entire books have been written about SNMP as well. They conveniently ignore this by using v2c and making access public, which might not be acceptable in real-world deployments.
I'm all for choosing "simple" tools and stacks over "complex" ones, for whatever definition of those terms one chooses to use, and I strive to do that in my own projects whenever possible, but simplicity is not an inherent property of old and battle-tested technologies. We should be careful to not be biased for technology we happen to be familiar with, but be pragmatic about picking the right tool for the job that fits our requirements, regardless of its age or…
Compared to a similar 6yo [1] and 3yo[2] (by zutty maker) comparisons, VTE terminals still (at least pre-46) bad in latency front. (They're as high as VS Code based beuke article.) Xterm still rules it. (Pointed in [2], this is due to direct rendering via Xlib which comes with the downside of having poor throughput.) Alacritty significantly improved, Konsole got worse. About Alacritty, it's pointed in [2], there were various opened tickets related to its poor performance and wasn't an easy to solve problem. So kudos to Alacritty devs for succeeding and GNOME devs for improving in the new version.
Alacritty, Kitty, Zutty, GNOME, others, quite a rejuvenation in terminal development.
[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/
[2]: https://tomscii.sig7.se/2021/01/Typing-latency-of-Zutty
Your benchmark is more than 6 years old, on a 2014 Macbook, with a strange choice of terminals. LWN's article on the subject is almost as old, but with a better comparison: https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/ (2018)
For a recent take, though by one of the competitors, see https://tomscii.sig7.se/2021/01/Typing-latency-of-Zutty
> TL;DR; terminal.app on macOS is typically the fastest.
Even on macOS, that's probably not true, at least nowadays. See https://www.lkhrs.com/blog/2022/07/terminal-latency/ (2022)
kitty has lower latency than Alacritty. Alacritty is optimized for throughput and is the best for that, but I don't understand who would prefer throughput over latency in a terminal setting.
I switched from kitty to wezterm. I don't have an official benchmark like the below [1], but low latency is an explicit goal of the project and it seems on par with kitty.
[1] https://tomscii.sig7.se/2021/01/Typing-latency-of-Zutty
There can be distinctly different run speeds between bulk entry dumb terminal and opcode heavy tui behavior.
https://tomscii.sig7.se/2020/12/A-totally-biased-comparison-of-Zutty#performance-and-resource-usage
And I don't really care that much but I will say that while it is a bit of a dog in the bulk display race, no one beats xterm in the keyboard latency contest.
st is such an outlier in those measurements that it makes you wonder whether something is potentially wrong with the test setup.
There's another set of latency measurements here: https://tomscii.sig7.se/2021/01/Typing-latency-of-Zutty In those, st is roughly similar in performance to urvxt and Alacritty.