Terminal Latency on Windows (2024)

Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago

bariumbitmap

113 points

93 comments

chadaustin.meTechstoryHigh profile

calmmixed

Debate

60/100

Windows TerminalPerformance OptimizationCommand Line Interfaces

Key topics

Windows Terminal

Performance Optimization

Command Line Interfaces

The article discusses terminal latency on Windows, sparking a discussion on the performance issues and potential improvements in Windows Terminal, as well as comparisons with other terminals and operating systems.

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Very active discussion

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44m

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0-6h

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01Story posted
Nov 11, 2025 at 1:07 PM EST
about 2 months ago
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02First comment
Nov 11, 2025 at 1:51 PM EST
44m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
23 comments in 0-6h
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04Latest activity
Nov 14, 2025 at 1:21 AM EST
about 2 months ago
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Discussion (93 comments)

Showing 31 comments of 93

CamperBob2

about 2 months ago

3 replies

Does it still pause scrolling and stop whatever's running if you click on the window or press a key? That's one big reason why I still live in a plain old DOS box. It didn't appear that the Windows terminal developers had ever heard of ctrl-s.

alexchantavy

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Dang, I've never heard of anyone who actually _wanted_ that behavior haha, I've had so much wasted time in school projects where I thought something was running but it wasn't because I had selected text in cmd.exe haha.

1718627440

about 2 months ago

2 replies

It stops running? I thought it just stops the output.

larkost

about 2 months ago

1 reply

I am not sure that if it actually stops the program, but it does at least stop programs from printing, so for anything that gives feedback on stderr/stdout you are at least pausing the main thread. I have a mostly-non-threaded program that this happens to, and it does not continue to send messages to other systems until I un-pause it.

jwatte

about 2 months ago

Ctrl-Z suspends the program in most UNIX shells. ("fg" to resume)

Ctrl-S may or may not end up stopping the program, depending on how much it's printing, and how much output buffering there is before it blocks on writing more.

shigawire

about 2 months ago

If you are waiting for the output as an indication that a task completed and you never see that output you may think the task is still running but it is actually done.

Has happened to me quite a few times.

hobs

about 2 months ago

That's called QuickEdit Mode and you have been able to turn that off for decades (and installing the new terminal fixes that too.)

Otherwise click the top left icon, go to settings, uncheck QuickEdit.

jwatte

about 2 months ago

All my shell RCs turn off xon/xoff -- that's a relic from the PDP-11 days we can all do without. Windows has the Scroll Lock button that's supposed to do this if you need it, but typically, just selecting a character in a terminal emulator will stop the scroll while still buffering the output.

thermalmotion

about 2 months ago

5 replies

Any chance of getting native support for Serial (DB9/RS232) communication in Windows Terminal? Would love to use it but I'm still using PuTTY and HyperTerminal.

digitalDM

about 2 months ago

1 reply

I recommend Tera term. https://github.com/TeraTermProject/teraterm/releases

opello

about 2 months ago

As much as I like PuTTY the ergonomics for "monitor this port as I plug/unplug the USB-to-Serial adapter" are so much better in TeraTerm.

GeorgeTirebiter

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Is there something lacking in PuTTY ?

zamadatix

about 2 months ago

The PuTTY terminal has a few more features in certain areas but a lot fewer features overall. Also, of course, PuTTY does not share profiles/settings/window tabs+panes with WT, which is a bit of a pain.

jcgl

about 2 months ago

Is there not a suitable CLI or TUI client for Windows that can simply be called from within Windows Terminal? Honest question. I just know that on Linux, it'd be really weird to ask for my terminal emulator to embed a serial client rather than call e.g. screen or minicom from my shell.

snvzz

about 2 months ago

Indeed. Plus some serial file transfer protocols. At least xmodem, ymodem and kermit.

zamadatix

about 2 months ago

I think it has been discussed but not implemented yet. In the meantime, tools like https://github.com/fasteddy516/SimplySerial give what you are looking for instead of those alternative GUI tools.

zadjii

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Notably this article was written based on Windows Terminal 1.18. That was before WT 1.22, which included this PR: [^1] which roughly doubled the terminal's throughput. That combined with a couple of other PRs in 1.22 made some scenarios up to _16x_ faster[^2]

[^1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/pull/17510

[^2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-...

zamadatix

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Thanks for the work on WT, it was really a massive step up I did not expect after all of these years.

zadjii

about 2 months ago

1 reply

You're most welcome! Working on it to help serve the whole developer ecosystem has been the delight of my career :)

typpilol

about 2 months ago

Just want to say built in glyphs makes terminal ANSI art awesome.

I forked a colorscripts project and added some true ANSI art after conversion and the built in glyphs look so much better than any other font.

It's great but is there any special rendering for the built in glyphs that's not possible with fonts? Just curious

bluedino

about 2 months ago

2 replies

Any similar benchmarks for MacOS?

I daily drive a couple Macs and enjoy them but I can't help but notice they seem slower in the terminal than the alternatives. Can't get any kind of discussion on /r/mac as it's just 'Apple silicon is fast!'

matternous

about 2 months ago

3 replies

This has been posted on HN a few times and seems to show that terminal.app is your best bet for most cases if you care about latency: https://danluu.com/term-latency/

worthless-trash

about 2 months ago

Terminal app has no truecolor support, no highres mouse support, no kitty graphics protocol, no double height character support, i'm sure there is more but I now discard it from my tests.

beanjuiceII

about 2 months ago

seems like outdated info

Aurornis

about 2 months ago

This was a great article when it came out, but it’s very outdated. The laptop used is over 10 years old now.

thewebguyd

about 2 months ago

You can run the tests yourself, he describes them in the blog. Used the Is It Snappy! app to measure frames.

I tried the throughput test myself just now between the native macOS terminal and ghostty.

Ghostty: cat /tmp/lines.txt 0.00s user 0.02s system 36% cpu 0.069 total

Native mac terminal: cat /tmp/lines.txt 0.00s user 0.02s system 18% cpu 0.115 total

Seems much faster than any of the OP's windows terminals tested except for MinTTY.

Likewise in one unscientific test with Is It Snappy, ghostty took 8 frames to render the output from pressing the key, but I didn't repeat multiple times.

So, seems faster, but I know what you are talking about, I experience it too. Something about using the terminal on macOS feels sluggish compared to alternatives. It's especially noticeable for me over SSH

0x1ch

about 2 months ago

Another aspect of this is which pipeline is in use for the GPU accelerated terminals. *WezTerm on Windows for example, specific rendering issues occur with default NVIDIA settings related to DXGI.

You will never interact with this pipeline if using the Web GPU vulkan renderer, which has its own issues. I personally experience some form of memory leak / latency when working in terminals that have been open for a 'good' amount of time.

randomtoast

about 2 months ago

In case you want to compare the latency on Linux: https://beuke.org/terminal-latency/

zonovar

about 2 months ago

Not really on 'latency' per se as discussed in the articole but an interesting take on slow terminals is Casey Muratori's famous rant on the topic [0] that led him to write his own terminal [1], a reference renderer for monospace terminal displays that is several orders of magnitude faster than Windows Terminal despite being largely unoptimized.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg

[1] https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

Cold_Miserable

about 2 months ago

Is there a simple way to get the "Legacy Console" back without having to format and reinstall windows? Installing packages / the windows modules installer is broken.

PKop

about 2 months ago

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ID: 45890726Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 6:39:46 PM

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