On Tue, 3 Mar 2026, Ramiro Aceves wrote:
I noticed that man pages rendering is very, very slow on virtual consoles.
Doing searchs with "/" is a pain, you see that lines are written from the top
to botton in two steps as the page is filled. You have to wait several
seconds until complete.
On the other side, over a ssh session they render fast.
I notice such behaviour on a NetBSD risc-v system under qemu but thought it
was a matter of running qemu with no acceleration at all.
Scrolling & paging being slow under QEMU VGA (+nvmm) is PR port-amd64/59361.
If less(1) is slow on bare metal, then, it's just a matter of setting the
correct TERM type:
Edit /etc/ttys and set `constty' (vt100) to `off', and instead, set `ttyE0'
to `on'.
Real VT100s require delays for certain operations, like setting/removing
attributes (bold/underline), or clearing the screen, and this delay is
encoded in the terminfo entries.
Virtual terminals like `wsvt25' don't need/have these delays.
Just set the correct TERM.
-RVP
