It's more that we've introduced tons of layers between keypress and screen. This is very useful, but it introduces latency throughout the system. Figthing the latency while keeping the features means we have to adopt new techniques.

I think both Fish and Kakoune fall into this category. They're a shell and a CLI/TUI text editor that feel incredibly modern compared to their predecessors (i.e. Zsh and Vim).

Why? Everything that seems smooth is that way because of the GPU.

It's a terminal. Text on a plain background shouldn't be hard to do. It shouldn't involve lots of fancy hardware. We've been doing it for decades with significantly less latency on significantly slower hardware.

If you want to see just how fast it can be, grab a linux instance, press ctrl+f1 to drop to a GUI free terminal and see just how responsive and how fast it can run.

It's kind of nuts that we have to rely on something as powerful as hardware acceleration via GPU to make plain text rendering on a screen in a GUI approach the same speed as CPU rendered text in a straight terminal console.

To be fair, the text mode rendering you're using as a benchmark, is implemented in hardware as well.

Indeed, a more fair comparison is to compare GNOME Terminal to xterm. You should see that xterm is way faster, but it's also uglier and has far fewer features. Overhead isn't always about worthless bloat.

Until you think about how complex text is in a modern graphical environment. Thousands of different characters, many of which can compose, all vectors with curves that needs to be rendered, and visually optimised with regards to their position relative to the screen pixels, but also optimised wrt their size.

It's on some crazy high resolution display. If you switch to text mode, your resolution drops a ton, and the required pixel pushing power drops accordingly.