[Remind-Fans] Terminal emulators (was Re: Remind 04.01.00 BETA 3 is available)

[taekoocair at wilsonb.com]

Those are nice articles. I recall encountering them before, and it was a nice
re-read.

Regarding the "size" metric, indeed shared libraries and other dependencies
make such measures only useful in context. To add yet another measure, we can
leverage Guix [0] to get the disk space used by the recursive closure of all
dependencies:

    for t in xfce4-terminal terminology qterminal kitty xterm st; do
        guix build "$t" \
        | xargs guix gc --requisites \
        | xargs du --summarize \
        | awk '{n+=$1};END{printf n/1024}' \
        | xargs printf '%s:\t%s MB\n' "$t"
    done | column --table

which outputs

    xfce4-terminal:  1053.08  MB
    terminology:     1476.35  MB
    qterminal:       1205.01  MB
    kitty:           629.844  MB
    xterm:           132.062  MB
    st:              100.328  MB

The Debian install method addresses the question, "How much extra disk space
will this eat up on my daily driver PC?" while the above addresses something
more like "How big is the full set of possible code paths potentially exercised
by this terminal?"

YYMV on how useful these numbers are, though.


[0]:https://guix.gnu.org/

Jochen Sprickerhof via Remind-fans <remind-fans at lists.skoll.ca> wrote:
> Hi Paul,
> 
> * Paul M. Foster via Remind-fans <remind-fans at lists.skoll.ca> [2022-09-22 23:14]:
> >For what it's worth, I run i3, and recently did a survey of the file
> >sizes of various terminal emulators.
> >
> >xfce4-terminal: 387440 bytes
> >terminology: 556184 bytes
> >qterminal (LXQt): 403600 bytes
> >kitty: 14568 bytes
> 
> Note that kitty is written in Python so this table is not really 
> meaningful. But then again you are also missing the shared libraries 
> loaded by the other variants. To give you some idea of the file size 
> (not sure if one can draw any conclusion out of it), I propose apt 
> install on a minimal Debian unstable chroot:
> 
> $ apt install --no-install-recommends xfce4-terminal | grep "additional disk space"
> After this operation, 179 MB of additional disk space will be used.
> 
> xfce4-terminal 179 MB
> terminology 300 MB
> qterminal 272 MB
> kitty 63.8 MB
> xterm 15.8 MB
> stterm 15.6 MB
> 
> with stterm being https://st.suckless.org/.
> 
> I would rather recommend looking at the memory usage when running the 
> executable and for my Debian unstable test system I see (in top -e m):
> 
>            VIRT    RES    SHR
> kitty   930.6m 103.3m  62.9m
> xterm    21.3m  11.0m   6.1m
> stterm   15.5m   8.5m   5.6m
> 
> I also recommend:
> 
> https://lwn.net/Articles/749992/
> https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/
> 
> Note that stterm gained some speed improvements in the meantime and you 
> can also hand tune it (if you really need) as I wrote down here:
> 
> https://lwn.net/Articles/752894/
> 
> Cheers Jochen
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