If you've ever wondered why I and others strive for efficient TUIs, crank up a 9600 BPS serial terminal connection and compare VIM and NeoVIM, both in 16 colour mode, drawing their initial empty document screens on a 230 by 50 size terminal.

VIM emits roughly 12KiB of characters over the wire, with a SPC for each erased character position. NeoVIM emits just over 1KiB of characters, using EL to erase each line after the initial tilde.

It takes VIM ~12 seconds to draw its initial screen, and NeoVIM ~1 second.

#SSH #RealTerminals #SerialPorts #LocalTerminals #NullModen