vtebench

A tool for generating terminal benchmarks

Usage

The general usage pattern is

vtebench -w $(tput cols) -h $(tput lines) [-c|-b=BYTES|-t=TERM] <benchmark>

Terminal protocol will be output to stdout. Output must be directed into a file rather than used directly to benchmark. vtebench is written for ease of understanding, not performance. To benchmark the currently running terminal then, something like this would work:

vtebench -w $(tput cols) -h $(tput lines) alt-screen-random-write \
    > /tmp/100mb.vte

time cat /tmp/100mb.vte

In the future, it would be nice to have a script to automate generating all of the tests, running them several times and generate statistics, and print all the results in a machine+human friendly format.

The -b|--bytes flag

It's important to generate sufficient output to test the terminal. If the test only takes 1ms to complete, you lack statistical significance. As a guideline, time cat <script> should take at least 1 second. How much data is needed to get there will vary greatly by terminal.

Contributing

If you wish to add a new test, do the following:

1. Add a new function in bench.rs with the same pattern as an existing function.
2. Add a subcommand to run it in the Benchmark enum within cli.rs.
3. Handle the subcommand in main.rs.

If there are escape codes that are not yet supported on Context it is quite helpful to reference the terminfo man page and cross reference with the terminfo crate's capability submodule documentation. Each capability name has a corresponding type in that submodule.