IMO the best part of the foot client/server setup is not lower memory usage, but faster terminal opening time. Starting alacritty is kinda slow. Maybe not a second, but noticeable. Starting foot standalone is definitely faster. Opening a foot window via an already running server is near instant.
I keep seeing comments like this popping up on HN. Do you guys have some funky esoteric configs?
In my case, where I only changed the color scheme and font, the limiting factor when starting alacritty is how fast I can move my fingers to the i3 shortcut. And I'm not running this on some exotic, fast hardware, just your standard crappy corporate HP laptop from a few years ago.
The only time there was a noticeable lag was when my zsh config was borked.
I think the concept of slow is relative here, for a no configuration start (from a fresh install) alacritty is slower by a factor of 4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40559084
However the absolute times are still probably not noticable unless you often cold-start terminals.
I can say personally that I switched away from alacritty because I would press my key bind and start typing, and it would consistently miss letters because I hadn’t waited for it to fully load. Foot does not.
If it was an app I opened by pressing Super and typing “terminal”, I probably wouldn’t need the speed increase. But the shortcut is easily accessible from home row, so I press it often and quickly.
I switched from konsole to foot, when I upgraded to plasma6 (and therefore to wayland). One of the main reasons was actually startup time.
I compared several terminals (konsole, alacritty, kitty, wezterm, foot) and foot had a notably faster startup time than the rest.
For me it starts fast enough without a client/server setup, whereas konsole often slightly annoyed me, when I just wanted to execute a single command.
