gitui triggers terminal activity all the time, even when it's inactive

Describe the bug
When I have gitui running in an iTerm tab, gitui triggers activity in the tab when I switch to another tab, despite the program being idle. I imagine it triggers for other terminal emulators, but I'm not in a position to easily test this.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Open an iTerm2 window with some tabs configured to show terminal activity
2. Open gitui in a tab
3. Switch to another tab
4. Observe activity in gitui's tab despite the program being idle

Expected behavior
I would expect an idle program to not trigger activity in my terminal emulator.

Context (please complete the following information):

• macOS 11.4
• GitUI Version 0.16
• Rust version: 1.52.1

Additional context
This happens in very large repos (e.g. a full clone of rust-lang/rust) and medium size repos (a work project), but not some nascent personal projects with just a few commits.

[extrawurst]

duplicate of #523

I’m not sure this is the case; an application can run without triggering activity in the terminal. Things like vim run in my terminal all day and don’t trigger activity. Am I missing something?

[extrawurst]

I’m not sure this is the case

what does that mean, do you think you observe a different issue than #523 ?

Yes. My terminal is configured to flag activity on output, not based on whether the application in the terminal is on the CPU. If I delay output to the terminal (e.g. something like sleep 5; echo hi), and switch to another tab, in 5 seconds my terminal will flag for activity just like gitui does when it's inactive.

[extrawurst]

configured to flag activity

how does this work? will this be triggered if anything is updated on the terminal text buffer?

[extrawurst]

are you referring to this iterm2 graphic?

I checked and this the same behaviour as tig, top, and zenith do. I assume this is triggered by any textual changes to the terminal. we could add a --quiet argument that does not show the spinner indicating ongoing background activity.

Hello!

It's the new-output indicator, not the activity indicator, my apologies. It's right below the activity indicator in the preferences and looks like this: