Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin

ddroidjj 4 days ago 53 commentsRead Article on frr.dev

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Discussion (53 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

exabrial•4 days ago

All the stupid spinners at the prompt are obnoxious. Unfortunately it’s so trendy it’s impossible to reverse course

rmunn•4 days ago

Good tools will have an option to disable the spinner. Haven't used Claude Code yet so don't know if it falls into the category of "good tools" by that definition. :-)

justsomehnguy•4 days ago

I like what you need to know a bazillion ways to disable all this unnecessary cruft.

And people would be angry if you even note what you don't need it.

I propose we should have some global switch to on/off these type of things, something like kern.fidget.widget=off or $VANILLA_PUMPKIN_LATTE=BROYEETSURE

skeledrew•4 days ago

Problem is, esp lately, Claude Code for example takes so long to respond that without the spinners and whatnot one may think the app is frozen or something. And even with them I still wonder sometimes.

exabrial•4 days ago

kern.fidget.user-has-an-acutal-job-to-get-done

bsder•4 days ago

The issue isn't the terminal. The issue seems to be that Claude is using React to render to that terminal at 60FPS like a goddamn video game

Vibe coding is soooo awesome!

And people thought that Electron was a resource pig. You ain't seen nothing yet.

tdeck•4 days ago

Without all thw unnecessary headings, "color", and constant "Let. That. Sink. In."-esque recaps this would be 2 paragraphs. Just let it be! Readers don't need the slop.

Shalomboy•4 days ago

I know people have their gripes with KDE, but Konsole has had a lot of these features for some time now.

deafpolygon•4 days ago

This, among many other reasons, is why I still use Terminal.app. I switched to iTerm for true color, but when Tahoe added it to Terminal.app- I switched back.

leephillips•4 days ago

I don’t use MacOS or Claude Code, but I do use Kitty terminal on Linux, which the author suggests has the same issues that plague him using Ghostty.

Kitty is a magnificent piece of software that has radically enhanced the interface between me and my computer. And it does this while consuming negligible resources.

YourDadVPN•4 days ago

What does it do for you that, say, konsole, gnome-terminal or even xterm wouldn't?

leephillips•4 days ago

Aside from its well-known features, such as displaying images directly in the terminal over ssh, I use it to create TUI applications. The application is a saved Kitty session, with a defined arrangement of windows. Each window runs a specified program, and communicates with the other windows over a Unix socket. Kitty has a convenient tool to create these sessions. Once created, I can start the session-application like any other program. The sessions are defined in a text file, so I can edit it to adjust the window arrangement or other details.

I also use its shell integration features, such as putting the scrollback into a pager, constantly.

guenthert•4 days ago

Does session management really belong in the terminal emulator?

mlok•4 days ago

I was wondering also. If it can help, there is an overview on Kitty's website : https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

graemep•4 days ago

Compared to Kitty, Konsole has image preview, click on files and links, tabs and tiles. Konsole does not have a way of changing the layout of tiles, equivalents to Kitty shell and remote control, pager, and the ssh integration (e.g. ls in an ssh session and Konsole will not open the file).

throwa356262•4 days ago

I dont get it. What exactly does kitty give use here?

Computer0•4 days ago

I don't know that I have ever understood a reason to leave the native terminal included with any given OS, particularly after the Windows modernization pass in recent years on the terminal.

goodmythical•4 days ago

layout, multiplexing, tab-complete, history, using the same interface across multiple systems, ligatures...

There are lots of distributions that ship emulators that don't have modern features, and even among those that do, I still don't want to learn the individual quirks every time I hit a shell.

Gnome terminal, yakuake, ptyxis, cosmic, konsole, xfce4-terminal, qterminal, etc all have slight variations between simple things like rendering and more important things like hotkeys. It's nice to have an alternative that I can install on any system such that I can get comfortable with just the one. If I can't install anything I'm often stuck poking around to find whatever the devs version of correct is, or else asking the owner of the machine "okay, how the hell do I do {x}?" if they're comfy with their cli, but chances are if I'm sitting there it's because they're not comfy with their cli.

I could cover a lot of it with a bashrc file, but I wouldn't want anyone fucking with mine, so I'm not touching anyone elses.

edit: distrObutions->distrIbutions

nick_•4 days ago

Same. Need multiple terminals visible at once? New window. Need a few separate sessions? New tab(s).

All the bells and whistles people have shown me over the years... it never even gets close to making me think "oh yea, that's better than basic tab/window management and the terminal app that comes with my OS".

skeledrew•4 days ago

I've always found tabs to be pretty limiting, though I have a ton of them in Firefox and Konsole since that's what's - been - available. They're marginal improvement over multiple windows. Then Horizon[0] came on the scene a few weeks ago and I fell in love with that infinite canvas. Started tweaking it like crazy, but now I'm working on a full port that natively supports Xpra[1], so I can have all my apps on an infinite canvas with views grouped exactly as I prefer. And that's the future IMO.

[0] https://github.com/peters/horizon [1] https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/

volemo•4 days ago

That requires a good window manager, which macOS does not have.

eddyg•4 days ago

There are tons of good options for window management these days.

I’m currently trialing https://tangrid.app/ and it’s got some nice features.

nick_•4 days ago

For the few times a month I need to have two windows/panes visible at the same time, I take five seconds positioning and sizing them then move on.

KolmogorovComp•4 days ago

use tmux.

cyanydeez•4 days ago

tiling managers like Terminator are, to me, the most efficient. Something like Blender for hybrid customization might be a sweetspot. Blender allows for arbitrary layout and essentially tab control in any tile.

Suzuran•4 days ago

In my case, it's always been because the native terminal emulator had issues actually emulating terminals when connected to remote systems, it was intended to be only a terminal-shaped wrapper around the host system's shell.

boesboes•4 days ago

Splits. And tabs. But mostly splits. Nothing tmux and/or a decent window mangers wouldn't fix. But Macos.

sghiassy•4 days ago

iTerm2 has builtin native tmux integration

Game changer

gmerc•4 days ago

Fucking AI slop

efilife•4 days ago

My exact reaction. Good to see more people think like this

HomeDeLaPot•3 days ago

You're missing the point—we are each supposed to have our agent summarize the key points for us so we don't have to read all the generated slop!

Let me do that now: hmm, this article seems to be a complaint about applications that waste energy.

anthk•4 days ago

>Zaragoza, Hotel Pilar Plaza café.

I won't use neither Claude, nor a MacBook; I would just keep chilling out programming with decent tools and a bare XTerm to accomplish the rest. I can get Aragonese bricks ^U sweets in the meanwhile.

On Terminal.app, I wonder if the GNUStep eversion and the ones bundled with Mac OSX shared some code.

goodmythical•4 days ago

My terminal is not burning battery anywhere at all like mining bitcoin, and neither is yours.

If you're not benefitting from the ability to offload your terminal rendering to GPU, why are you using a terminal that offloads terminal rendering to GPU in the first place?

Imagine running something massively CPU bound, but you've still got to spin up perhaps tens of terminals in order to simultaneously ssh in to multiple servers because you don't want to set up a remote monitoring solution because you don't want each of the servers to be running a docker image where SSH>htop would suffice.

There are plenty of situations in which one might want a terminal emulator offloaded to gpu. That you are not in any of those situations is no reason to write a hit piece throwing shade as if the packages mentioned are somehow bloated or inefficient.

Imagine whining about how you've got to pay adobe and use several gigabytes of ram to resize jpgs. You'd obviously be outside Photoshop's ideal customer profile, just as you are outside ghostty et al's.