Improve the speed

[wybert]

Wow! That's AWESOME work. I have one suggestion for the performance. TUI is usually faster than GUI tools. I have tested euporie and vscode to open on the notebook, euporie does not faster than vscode. Also when using the preview function, euporie is slower than nbviewer

[joouha]

Hi,

Thanks!

There are various reasons that euporie is slower at rendering notebooks than VSCode and nbviewer.js:

• euporie is written in Python, while VSCode and nbviewer.js are written in JavaScript. Python is generally a slower language than Javascript, because nowadays Javascript uses just-in-time compilation to achieve high speeds.

• Both VSCode and nbviewer.js use web-browser rendering engines to display output (VSCode uses electron which uses blink, and nbviewer-app will use webkit). Web-browsers are already capable of rendering HTML and images and are extremely optimized for rendering speed.

  Terminals do not have built-in support for rendering rich output like HTML, SVG, and images. For displaying images in the terminal using ASCII-art style output, I'm relying on external libraries or programs which can convert images to text output faster than can be done in Python. Some formats can require multiple conversion steps, depending on which programs the user has installed (e.g. svg -> png -> pil -> ansi -> formatted_text). For rendering HTML, I've written a new HTML renderer for displaying HTML in the terminal, but I've not got round to optimizing this for speed yet, and Python is not an ideal language for writing an HTML rendering engine!

• I've not done much work optimizing notebook rendering yet. For example, in euporie-preview, cells are rendered sequentially; it might be much faster to cells using a thread-pool, I've just not had time to try this out yet!

In short, I think it's unlikely that euporie will be as fast as similar tools which use modern web rendering engines to display output, but there is still a lot of potential for speed-ups! It's just going to take time.

There are various (less feature-rich) alternatives which may render notebooks faster then euporie listed here in the documentation which you might be interested in trying.

[DCoderUltra]

Hi @joouha, this project is such a great idea! As someone who has terminal centric workflow this project comes in handy. However as mentioned by @wybert there is some problems when it comes to speed.

• Do you think that a rewrite in other language would increase the speed in a significant manner or just improving the rendering would lead to much higher speeds?

• In terms of rich output maybe using nerdfonts as a font requirement could avoid the rendering of some images since there are +10 000 icons.

Congrats for all the work so far. Thanks!