"The single biggest win is what's not there: no oh-my-zsh, no prezto or plugin m...

1vuio0pswjnm7 · 2026-06-08T23:32:42 1780961562

I use the term "terminal emulator" in the same sense as in the blog post:

"The terminal itself

Shell startup is only half the story, because the emulator adds its own input latency. I use Ghostty, which is GPU-accelerated and native, and my config is just seven lines long."

I do not use Ghostty or anything similar^1

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terminal_emulators

Further, the terminal emulator cited by the blog author requires a graphics driver

I do not use a graphics driver

JdeBP · 2026-06-09T08:15:56 1780992956

> I do not use a graphics driver.

Yes you do. It's the one that your in-kernel terminal emulator talks to in order to splat its bitmap fonts onto the screen. It is whatever wsdisplay has attached to, which can be one of a range of things from genfb through voodoofb and machfb to radeonfb. There was even a vesafb about 20 years ago.

1vuio0pswjnm7 · 2026-06-11T13:14:42 1781183682

To be clear, I only use the VGA driver,^1 I do not use it to display non-text graphics, e.g., images, and I do not use a framebuffer on NetBSD^2

The blog author is using more than the VGA driver to display text, as indicated by the reference to "GPU-accelerated"

1. Some call this a "graphics driver" while others state it "does not do graphics"

2. For example, drivers with names ending in "fb", such as "vesafb"

1vuio0pswjnm7 · 2026-06-10T16:27:40 1781108860

Terminal emulators such as Ghostty usually depend on a "desktop" environment such as GNOME, KDE, etc.

I do not use a "desktop" environment

As such, I do not need the dependencies of such terminal emulators, such as "gtk" ("GIMP ToolKit") a widget toolkit for creating GUIs ("Graphical User Interfaces")

As I am only using the command line, not a "desktop", I have no need for a GUI toolkit

1vuio0pswjnm7 · 2026-06-10T13:20:57 1781097657

To be more clear, I use a "graphics driver" but only in textmode. Perhaps a better statement would be "I do not use a graphics mode"

https://man.netbsd.org/vga.4

"VGA graphics driver"

"This driver handles VGA graphics..."

I only use VGA textmode

I do not context switch into a graphics mode via 13h. No need

The blog author mentions that his terminal emulator is "GPU-accelerated" ("GPU" stands for "Graphic Processing Unit")

I don't use a terminal emulator that requires a graphics mode or one that uses a GPU

I'm interested in "text processing", displaying text. I like reading

I'm not interested in displaying images

1vuio0pswjnm7 · 2026-06-09T14:00:36 1781013636

"I do not use a graphics driver"

Maybe this is not clear. I apologise for any ambiguity

vga(4) can be referred to as a "graphics driver"

For example,

https://man.netbsd.org/vga.4

But it does not support (non-text) graphics

It only supports text

The blog author is using a graphics layer such as X11 or Wayland along with a terminal emulator such as Ghostty on top of it

I do not use those things

JdeBP · 2026-06-08T18:48:29 1780944509

> Thus I don't use a terminal emulator.

Yes you do. It's the one built into your operating system's kernel. You'll find a lot of, but not all of, its code in /usr/src/sys/dev/wscons .

1vuio0pswjnm7 · 2026-06-11T16:22:35 1781194955

"Terminal emulator" as used in the blog post refers to userland software, such as Ghostty, not a terminal emulation module in the operating system kernel

The author of the blog post is using both (a) terminal emulator userland software and (b) kernel module(s) that perform terminal emulation

I only use one. I do not use a userland terminal emulator program

1vuio0pswjnm7 · 2026-06-09T11:48:31 1781005711

On NetBSD, I don't use a framebuffer

I use the vga driver which does not do graphics