4 ms·

Alacritty is so fast. It's amazing. It has a few problems though, like I keep selecting text by mistake. Also, no tab support? At the end of the day, I think

Alacritty is so fast. It's amazing. It has a few problems though, like I keep selecting text by mistake. Also, no tab support? At the end of the day, I think iTerm2 is a good balance between speed and functionality.

bmon 10y ago
Alacrity is intended to be used with a multiplexer like tmux, at least for now. I doubt you'll see tab support any time soon, if ever.
- rs86 10y ago
  Shouldn't be any other way. Modularity is such a nice idea. Much nicer than spinning up something that takes 600 MB of RAM in components not necessary to completing the task at hand. Maybe if electron's dependencies could be compiled down to the minimum functionality needed by a given application this could work.
  - nkkollaw 10y ago
    I wonder if Chrome providing a headless mode could somehow improve things.
    - marcoms 10y ago
      Doesn't headless mode just mean rendering to a bitmap instead of a window?
      - nkkollaw 10y ago
        No, but it's usually used to take screenshots and stuff like that. It means rendering without the UI from what I understand.
  - RubyPinch 10y ago
    As far as Alacritty is concerned, modularity can easily come with a cost. once you add in e.g. tmux for multiplexing and scrollback, then you are bottlenecked at tmux's speeds, as opposed to the terminal emulator's speeds (not like it really matters, but its an interesting effect)
    - Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
      That will be interesting for the tmux (or do we go all the way to nurses??) developers, because tmux has probably always been way faster than any terminal emulator it has been running in. Where will the bottleneck be?
      - RubyPinch 10y ago
        I ain't too sure, but https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5mflek/alacritty_a_gpuaccelerated_terminal_emulator/dc3r3zc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5mflek/alacrit... The Terminology (another light-weight term, with memory goals, that has scrollback) developer's comments are here
- Philipp__ 10y ago
  And I am all for that, since i have configured and used tmux for a more than 5 years now. But what bummed me a bit is copy/paste handling (they think it should be handled by tmux, which is one of the tmux' weaknesses imho)
  - bmon 10y ago
    I'm totally with you. I haven't managed to get tmux copy paste to behave like I'd like it to, so I have a bind to toggle the mouse on or off, then use the alacritty functionality to copy. It's clunky to say the least. I hope alacritty eventually implements something like holding shift and dragging enables mouse selection (like gnome shell).
nonsince 10y ago
It's designed to be used urxvt-style, where the core has just enough features to allow other programs to build that kind of stuff on top of it.
- oblio 10y ago
  That feels like such a cop-out. The tab paradigm is widely adopted and it seems strange for a terminal developed in 2017 to aim for xterm's feature set :) At least the core developers should provide the default tabbed wrapper on top of it. But who knows, maybe it will be successful even without tabs.
- helb 10y ago
  URxvt has tabs, via some sort of plugins. There are (at least) two "Perl extensions" for it. urxvt -pe tabbed # or urxvt -pe tabbedex Tabbedex needs to be installed, it has more features than `tabbed` (which is bundled with rxvt iirc), eg. tab renaming and moving. Looks like this: https://vgy.me/S1j8Re.png https://vgy.me/S1j8Re.png

bmon 10y ago

Alacrity is intended to be used with a multiplexer like tmux, at least for now. I doubt you'll see tab support any time soon, if ever.

rs86 10y ago
Shouldn't be any other way. Modularity is such a nice idea. Much nicer than spinning up something that takes 600 MB of RAM in components not necessary to completing the task at hand. Maybe if electron's dependencies could be compiled down to the minimum functionality needed by a given application this could work.
- nkkollaw 10y ago
  I wonder if Chrome providing a headless mode could somehow improve things.
  - marcoms 10y ago
    Doesn't headless mode just mean rendering to a bitmap instead of a window?
    - nkkollaw 10y ago
      No, but it's usually used to take screenshots and stuff like that. It means rendering without the UI from what I understand.
- RubyPinch 10y ago
  As far as Alacritty is concerned, modularity can easily come with a cost. once you add in e.g. tmux for multiplexing and scrollback, then you are bottlenecked at tmux's speeds, as opposed to the terminal emulator's speeds (not like it really matters, but its an interesting effect)
  - Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
    That will be interesting for the tmux (or do we go all the way to nurses??) developers, because tmux has probably always been way faster than any terminal emulator it has been running in. Where will the bottleneck be?
    - RubyPinch 10y ago
      I ain't too sure, but https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5mflek/alacritty_a_gpuaccelerated_terminal_emulator/dc3r3zc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5mflek/alacrit... The Terminology (another light-weight term, with memory goals, that has scrollback) developer's comments are here
Philipp__ 10y ago
And I am all for that, since i have configured and used tmux for a more than 5 years now. But what bummed me a bit is copy/paste handling (they think it should be handled by tmux, which is one of the tmux' weaknesses imho)
- bmon 10y ago
  I'm totally with you. I haven't managed to get tmux copy paste to behave like I'd like it to, so I have a bind to toggle the mouse on or off, then use the alacritty functionality to copy. It's clunky to say the least. I hope alacritty eventually implements something like holding shift and dragging enables mouse selection (like gnome shell).

nonsince 10y ago

It's designed to be used urxvt-style, where the core has just enough features to allow other programs to build that kind of stuff on top of it.

oblio 10y ago
That feels like such a cop-out. The tab paradigm is widely adopted and it seems strange for a terminal developed in 2017 to aim for xterm's feature set :) At least the core developers should provide the default tabbed wrapper on top of it. But who knows, maybe it will be successful even without tabs.
helb 10y ago
URxvt has tabs, via some sort of plugins. There are (at least) two "Perl extensions" for it. urxvt -pe tabbed # or urxvt -pe tabbedex Tabbedex needs to be installed, it has more features than `tabbed` (which is bundled with rxvt iirc), eg. tab renaming and moving. Looks like this: https://vgy.me/S1j8Re.png https://vgy.me/S1j8Re.png