GTK Terminal
mlterm recently performs really bad when outputting antialiased fonts and it gets even worse under -ck. I mean it's way too slow (invocation is fast; but aa output is unbearable).
mlterm outputting aa texts under 2.6.15-ck7:
$ time ls repo/git
...
real 0m6.104s
user 0m0.007s
sys 0m0.008s
$ ls repo/git|wc -l
439
As you can see there are only 439 entries but the output speed is far from satisfactory.
As A Look at GNOME 2.14 suggests, gnome-terminal (vte based) beats xterm by a factor of ten! But i dont have those gnome libs and i tend not to bloat my system. So i grab the latest vte and a terminal using vte and gtk simply called gtk-terminal.
Now the speed is very fast:
$ time ls repo/git
...
real 0m0.033s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.006s
Wow, it's impressive.
But there are some glitches out there that feel kinda annoying:
It does not acknowledge my font.conf (in which i disabled antialiase of my Chinese font if it's small enough).
When highlighting text, it uses a light gray background to show the result, which is unacceptable since i use black background with foreground white fonts. A sane behavior (like any sane terminal would do) is to reverse all the colors when doing the highlighting.
It does not acknowledge the charset settings saved in '.gtk-terminalrc'. You have to re-set it every time you use it. Obviously it shouldnt be this way.
After digging around the gtk-terminal source code and vte reference (it's kinda outdated; refer to the doc inside latest vte tarball please), i found the problems were caused by:
It was enforced to always show antialiased text ignoring user settings.
The highlighting color was hard coded. (the default is actually to reverse colors if you dont hard code it)
The read-from-rc charset was overwritten with a 'default charset'.
The resulting patch (against gtk-terminal version 0.2.1) is in fact quite straightforward and self-contained. You can get a clue just by taking a look at it.
'Bugs' are fixed. The world is clear. And yet there are some 'features' i'd like to request/have (or code) later if possible:
- Faster invocation.
- Dynamic window title (of the running program).
- Multi tabs.
Would dig into it more. Stay tuned.
