While having fun on Linux with different terminals (urxvt/xterm/st/alacritty) I discovered a new GPU accelerated terminal available on MacOS/Windows/Linux: Kitty I installed it and checked the affirmation that it was fast, thus comparing it to Alacritty,iTerm2,MacOSTerminal All tests are done with default settings on those terminal and on the fish shell, that is still vanilla

My tests are run on a 2018 Macbook Pro completely bloated ;-) wich went from Mojave to Catalina to Big Sur with lots of junk Microsoft software and work files\

The command run is simple:

time tree /

Around 1 300 000 directories / 2 084 000 files :-)

Results:

• Alacritty

Executed in  470.11 secs   fish           external
   usr time   96.46 secs  117.00 micros   96.46 secs
   sys time  155.80 secs  456.00 micros  155.80 secs

• Terminal

Executed in  345.16 secs   fish           external 
   usr time   89.45 secs  110.00 micros   89.45 secs 
   sys time  148.68 secs  439.00 micros  148.68 secs 

• iTerm2

Executed in  407.53 secs   fish           external
   usr time   87.34 secs  104.00 micros   87.34 secs
   sys time  144.89 secs  418.00 micros  144.89 secs

• Kitty

Executed in  340.81 secs   fish           external 
   usr time   88.90 secs  135.00 micros   88.90 secs 
   sys time  147.10 secs  479.00 micros  147.10 secs 

Final Results:

Kitty > Terminal > iTerm2 > Alacritty

The impressive result is that default Mac OS Terminal is doing quite well !