Dear Rxvt Unicode,
I've been playing around with using a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop machine.
It's pretty fast and I can use it to watch movies and stuff. Web browsing is
passable.
One thing that sticks out about the performance of my setup is that urxvt takes some time
to refresh windows. Since I use a tiling window manager, I often navigate back and forth
between windows in a "tabbed" layout. I notice that it is almost always
possible to see the downward motion of text being redrawn in my terminals. The effect is
more pronounced when Unicode glyphs are present, and I was able to capture it in a short
screen recording of me switching back and forth between three windows:
mpv
'https://www.dropbox.com/s/kf7h0up8m4l6f8b/urxvt-refresh-2019-12-13_16.35.46.mkv?dl=0'
I didn't include it in the recording, but of course scrolling up and down by
one line in Emacs or w3m or any other terminal program also produces a visible
refresh scan.
Am I missing a configure option which would tell Urxvt to draw to an offscreen
buffer or something? I'm guessing that the reason for the excessive slowness on
this system is a slow (Broadcom VideoCore VI 500 MHz) GPU. I have an old Intel
laptop which is actually slower than the 1.5 GHz ARM CPU on the Pi 4 for some
non-graphics tasks, and I never notice Urxvt refreshing on my laptop.
I'm guessing this is below the threshold of importance to appear on the
development roadmap of Rxvt Unicode, but since Urxvt is the fastest best
terminal, and since the Pi 4 is the fastest cheapest mostly open compute
module, I thought it might be worth brainstorming about how to improve the
combined experience.
For what it's worth, I can also see refresh scans with Xterm, maybe it is about
the same as urxvt, but it seems to lack Unicode support so it is hard to
compare.
Thanks,
Frederick
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