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!'
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
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/
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.
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!'