10 ms·

Alacritty v0.5

128 points by sbt567 6y ago

joobus 6y ago
FYI, still doesn't support font ligatures, if you're into that sort of thing: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tlackemann 6y ago
Been using Alacritty on my Linux desktop for the better part of the year and it's been simply a joy. It convinced me to install it on my mac and windows machines too. I know it's just a terminal and very mundane to be excited by, but the performance shows if you're a heavy command line user. tail logs look smoother, typing never lags, really well done.
- 1_player 6y ago
  Given its enormous latency, is that all placebo effect?
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    I'm sure it is. I use it because it works well in my config, specifically I was able to configure the fonts the way I wanted it. Before that I used xterm and it was absolutely fine. Typing lag? Please. The only terminals I've ever seen performance issues are the Mac ones like iTerm 2.
    - chacha2 6y ago
      Here's a YouTuber doing some tests. https://youtu.be/PZPMvTvUf1Y?t=586 https://youtu.be/PZPMvTvUf1Y?t=586 Was a lot faster there.
      - bsdubernerd 6y ago
        Displaying gobs of output in a terminal is pretty much the most useless benchmark you can do for a terminal emulator. You never watch output that goes by faster than you can read, unless you're actively watching movies through aalib or libcaca. I would be happy to have a "framedrop" equivalent for terminals when this happens, as it's totally useless from my perspective. Not to say that optimizing throughput it's useless (total time adds up over the course of a day), but latency and start-up time are really what matters in a terminal emulator. It's also hard to measure correctly, because some terminal features such as output reflow and ligature support hide major spikes in latency that you only experience occasionally but can be incredibly annoying (say hi to all url regex matchers!). alacritty felt absolutely abysmal in the latency department when I last tried it one year ago, which is even worse than most libvte based terminals. kitty is much better, but it's not exactly a lightweight terminal. It still starts in no less than a full second compared to mere a tenth of a second of urxvt, xterm or mlterm. urxvt always felt more consistent to me, but all three outclass pretty much all other terminals I ever tried. For those using a tiling window manager, the built-in tabbing and multi-window support is pretty much useless too. Having true-color support is probably the only big argument I can see, which is nice to have for inband images, but again.. something rarely used in practice.
        jlokier 6y ago
        > You never watch output that goes by faster than you can read, unless you're actively watching movies through aalib or libcaca. This is not true for me. During development I often run programs that spew an enormous quantity of log output, and I'm watching to see if I notice a pattern in the output visually, or if it just looks normal. Either some critical or warning message in a different colour or boldface, or a shape to the messages that I'd recognise. Although in principle I could use various output filters, grep etc., sometimes that's effort and I'd rather just run the thing and have it run quickly. Also it's convenient to have all the output readily available if I do want to look at something that happened, as I can scroll to that place and look at pages of surrounding context in detail. If I use output filters, then I have to faff about re-running the program with different filters, or with all outputs enabled so I can step through everything around the event of interest. Admittedly sometimes its better to output to a file and search the file, but sometimes visual output at 60Hz works quite well. I have been known to skim manuals very fast as well. I guess in the era when man pages were everything, I got used to scrolling really fast to look for things of interest. It's interesting that a brain is able to recognise particular word-forms that flick by extremely fast, much faster than reading them. I've had people tell me they cannot do this, so I guess it's a learned skill.
francislavoie 6y ago
Not having smart copy is a complete dealbreaker to me https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1919 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1919 Windows Terminal has smart copy by default now and the UX improvements of it are a huge difference. I use pantheon-terminal (i.e. the one from elementaryOS) on my linux environments, and the only reason is because it also has smart copy. It means that on all the applications I use, Ctrl+C does _exactly_ what I expect, all the time. I don't want to have to context-switch when I go to a terminal and remember "oh yeah, I need to hold shift too" and accidentally kill the running process like a "tail -f" that I have running for logs on some server. I understand it might be technically difficult to implement, but it means I can't switch to Alacritty without inevitable daily frustration.
- moonchild 6y ago
  You can try mapping it to super+c/super+v, as macos does. (If apps you use don't support key rebinding, then a little xdotool|autohotkey|autokey magic can do it.)
  - francislavoie 6y ago
    I don't use a mac though, and no, very no, thanks. I want my terminal to have the SAME hotkey as every other app on my system, not something different. And I'm not going to relearn Ctrl+C/V with a different hotkey globally. That's too crazy an ask.
    - silon42 6y ago
      Every decent app should support copy paste with ctrl+insert/shift+insert and doesn't conflict with terminal use of control characters... The alternative is to stop using terminal emulators.
- smabie 6y ago
  I mean, with Xorg, just select and middle click. Am I missing something?
smabie 6y ago
Last time I checked I remembered encountering absolutely horrendous input latency with alacrity, does anyone know if this is still the case?
- dsissitka 6y ago
  I tested it about a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23954002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23954002 It's pretty much on par with Visual Studio Code. There's also this: https://github.com/dsissitka/dev-env-config/commit/96f162c4bd8cf07a84a19c0c52a0b4cbe58393a9 https://github.com/dsissitka/dev-env-config/commit/96f162c4b... They still claim it's "the fastest terminal emulator in existence."
  - xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
    I fought really hard to like alacritty and tune it to be fast and ultimately it was laggy and slow as heck. The rendering pass was abysmal last I checked. If there are too many characters on the screen, fps falls off a cliff. No modern terminal should have render performance of O(n), n=characters. If I hit enter you don't need to re-rasterize all those glyphs.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  st with tmux is pretty great. Just about the lowest input latency you're likely to find on Linux, AFAIK, and tmux means you need few or no patches to st to have a full-featured term. Not as low-latency as Mac terminal, but then again I don't know of a Linux terminal emulator that is.
  - nickjj 6y ago
    The last time I tried st the input latency was quite a bit more than xterm. Noticeable enough to feel the difference when opening them side by side and typing normally. xterm is really as good as it gets if you want a buttery smooth typing experience.
    - 6y ago
riquito 6y ago
Kudos, impressive release
platz 6y ago
I've been using urxvt for some reason.. maybe out of simplicity. It's color range is bad though, though at the same time it's colors are more accurate than if i run xfce4-terminal, for example.
- ninjin 6y ago
  I migrated from urxvt to Alacritty a little less than six months ago, here are some reflections. Despite all the talk about performance, I find urxvt to be more responsive. However, it is really not something that bothers me during day-to-day usage and I suspect that it will improve over time as urxvt is about as dead as it gets when it comes to a code base. I also ran into some font scaling issues across monitors [1], but I suspect urxvt gets around this mostly by being completely ignorant of things that have happened over the last 20 years. [1]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3465 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3465 Some awesome parts on the side of Alacritty. The community is nice and responsive, documentation good, code modern, and configuring it is straightforward (auto reload upon file edit anyone?). Try getting fallback fonts to work properly with urxvt for example, that is what ultimately drove me away urxvt as the rendering issues I encountered with CJK fonts just drove me up the walls. The worst being somehow shifting the font size depending on whether a character was present in my Japanese font or not. Bonus, I believe the following is sufficient to emulate the look and feel of urxvt in your `.alacritty.yml`: window: padding: x: 2 y: 2 draw_bold_text_with_bright_colors: true
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  I went from xterm to urxvt (which I used for many years), back to xterm, then to st to alacritty and finally settled on kitty, which I love. kitty has TrueColor support, way more features than aclacritty (which seems to take a more minimalist approach, if I remember right, and this was one of the main reasons I switched from the latter to the former), and in my experience has been both extremely fast and extremely stable. The only thing I really don't like about it is that it seems to copy continuously to the clipboard when I click and drag over some text, so pieces of that text end up cluttering my clipboard history (for which I use parcellite on Linux). The final selection when I finish moving my mouse and let go of my left mouse button works fine, as usual, so I'm willing to live with this... though I'd still prefer it not to copy anything to my clipboard until I've finished clicking and dragging and released my left mouse button.
pacomerh 6y ago
Is it as fast as Kitty now?, last time I check the fastest one was still Kitty (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/)
- bjoli 6y ago
  It has had a lot higher throughput than Kitty for a long time, but whether it is perceived as faster is a different thing. Some people in this thread say alacritty has high latency, which might make it feel more sluggish.
- Jenk 6y ago
  Kitty has a better feature set imo, too, but is a shame the author is such an ass about Windows that he refuses to even contemplate support for it.
  - KitDuncan 6y ago
    Why does that make him an ass? It's his project, he can do whatever he likes with it.
    - Jenk 6y ago
      It doesn't, it is his attitude when people ask about it that makes him an ass.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Kitty seems to have lower latency, and you can feel it, but it has really weird broken font rendering for me.
ducktective 6y ago
So if I'm using Ubuntu, I'm supposed to set-up a Rust toolchain and keep it updated to be able to install Alacritty?
- francislavoie 6y ago
  The good news is, the rust toolchain is probably one of the easiest to install and update, of almost any programming language. https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Deal-breaker. But now I know about Kitty, which is supposed to be faster.
- abrowne 6y ago
  They included a deb until this release :-/ There are packages in the Pop OS PPA[1] I am planning on using. (They haven't added 0.5 yet.). I won't add the PPA, just download and install the deb. It looks like this release has been published to crates.io[2], which was a blocker to getting alacritty packaged in Debian[3], so hopefully soon it will be added and synced to Ubuntu. 1: https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+packages https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+package... 2: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/357#issuecomment-667449072 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/357#issuecomme... 3: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851639 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851639
  - abrowne 6y ago
    Version 0.5 has been added: https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+packages?field.name_filter=alacritty&field.status_filter=published&field.series_filter=focal https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+package...
jonny383 6y ago
Been using alacritty on Linux for about a year. After some customisation and key binding setups for tmux, it's easily the best terminal emulator I have used on Linux. Don't know for sure, but it does feel faster and more polished than kitty.
BlackLotus89 6y ago
It's finally usable for me as well [0] Especially for lower end machines like the pinebook pro it's nixe to have a smooth scrolling and rendering experience. The only terminal that renderd without much of a delay on it was st[1] And that I would probably have to patch [2] to get a great experience out of. (it's already good) [0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/128#issuecomment-663927477 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/128#issuecomme... [1] https://st.suckless.org/ https://st.suckless.org/ [2] https://st.suckless.org/patches/ https://st.suckless.org/patches/ Edit: Both terminals kitty and alacritty seem to work now out of the box on my setup.No environment variablres required :)
- acdw 6y ago
  The one issue I had with st, and it was big enough that I had to switch, was that it crashes on some emoji. It's actually not even an st issue, it's upstream in ... some X font library, I think, but that just means that I can't take my st with me from computer to computer. It sucks, really, because st's great otherwise and it's not even their fault.
DrBazza 6y ago
I've used alacritty, and then just went back to using konsole. I didn't really get any feeling it was 'faster'. Why does every rust project claim to be 'blazing fast'?
- rnestler 6y ago
  There was a blog post with some benchmarks in 2018: https://jwilm.io/blog/alacritty-lands-scrollback/ https://jwilm.io/blog/alacritty-lands-scrollback/ But not sure if this is still applicable.
  - saurik 6y ago
    Some other benchmarks show it as slower, particularly with respect to latency (where I agree with the people who say this is the most important metric: "throughout" has only really ever mattered to me in extreme cases, such as with mintty, which slowly renders all intermediate states); this was brought up in a Hacker News discussion of this link you just posted, and has been discussed elsewhere, such as reddit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006751 https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/8ffddi/alacrittys_not_as_fast_as_we_thought/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/8ffddi/alacrittys_not... The whole "Alacritty is the fastest terminal emulator in existence" just frankly just comes off as dishonest marketing BS given that people even elsewhere here on this thread keep reporting jank issues :/, and it kind of gives the Rust community in general a "bad look" since a lot of projects also claim they are "blazing fast" and it makes you wonder "are you really checking that? are you measuring the right thing?".
    - DrBazza 6y ago
      My comment about rust and 'blazingly fast' is a bit offhand, but my point is just because it's native, doesn't mean it's fast. People can, and do, write crappy slow code in any language. C++ projects (or D, Zig, Nim, Swift, or your native language of choice) don't sell themselves as 'blazingly fast' every single time but all, in principle, produce fast native code.
japaget 6y ago
I tried the portable install on 64-bit Windows 10 1909 Professional and it didn't work. The cursor was stuck in the upper left hand corner and I never got a command prompt.
paedubucher 6y ago
I still have issues that the font is bigger on my laptop screen than on my external screen. This is really annoying.
- mklein994 6y ago
  I found that changing my keybinding to start alacritty with this environment variable set seems to work: WINIT_X11_SCALE_FACTOR=1.0 alacritty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/commit/93780ef0929e08f3c5212e5451152ecaf1a28813 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/commit/93780ef0929e08...
jedisct1 6y ago
I've been using Alacritty for a while, but eventually got back to the standard Terminal.app and iTerm. The former feels snappier (and is probably GPU-accelerated as well anyway), looks better and comes out of the box. The later has way more features. I just tried Alacritty 0.5, and it has some weird artifacts when text color changes, which happens a lot when the shell highlights commands, or when editing text. Anyway, it's great to have options.
- kemayo 6y ago
  For what it's worth, iTerm has been GPU-accelerated since 3.2, when it got a new Metal rendering engine: https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_2_0.changelog https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_2_0.changelog
michaelcampbell 6y ago
Thank you for putting a "what this is" paragraph in the referenced page.
jchook 6y ago
All we wanted was tabs, but instead we got... tmux copy mode? Even though we already have to use tmux because... no tabs.

128 points by sbt567 6y ago

FYI, still doesn't support font ligatures, if you're into that sort of thing: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tlackemann 6y ago

Been using Alacritty on my Linux desktop for the better part of the year and it's been simply a joy. It convinced me to install it on my mac and windows machines too. I know it's just a terminal and very mundane to be excited by, but the performance shows if you're a heavy command line user. tail logs look smoother, typing never lags, really well done.

1_player 6y ago
Given its enormous latency, is that all placebo effect?
- globular-toast 6y ago
  I'm sure it is. I use it because it works well in my config, specifically I was able to configure the fonts the way I wanted it. Before that I used xterm and it was absolutely fine. Typing lag? Please. The only terminals I've ever seen performance issues are the Mac ones like iTerm 2.
  - chacha2 6y ago
    Here's a YouTuber doing some tests. https://youtu.be/PZPMvTvUf1Y?t=586 https://youtu.be/PZPMvTvUf1Y?t=586 Was a lot faster there.
    - bsdubernerd 6y ago
      Displaying gobs of output in a terminal is pretty much the most useless benchmark you can do for a terminal emulator. You never watch output that goes by faster than you can read, unless you're actively watching movies through aalib or libcaca. I would be happy to have a "framedrop" equivalent for terminals when this happens, as it's totally useless from my perspective. Not to say that optimizing throughput it's useless (total time adds up over the course of a day), but latency and start-up time are really what matters in a terminal emulator. It's also hard to measure correctly, because some terminal features such as output reflow and ligature support hide major spikes in latency that you only experience occasionally but can be incredibly annoying (say hi to all url regex matchers!). alacritty felt absolutely abysmal in the latency department when I last tried it one year ago, which is even worse than most libvte based terminals. kitty is much better, but it's not exactly a lightweight terminal. It still starts in no less than a full second compared to mere a tenth of a second of urxvt, xterm or mlterm. urxvt always felt more consistent to me, but all three outclass pretty much all other terminals I ever tried. For those using a tiling window manager, the built-in tabbing and multi-window support is pretty much useless too. Having true-color support is probably the only big argument I can see, which is nice to have for inband images, but again.. something rarely used in practice.
      - jlokier 6y ago
        > You never watch output that goes by faster than you can read, unless you're actively watching movies through aalib or libcaca. This is not true for me. During development I often run programs that spew an enormous quantity of log output, and I'm watching to see if I notice a pattern in the output visually, or if it just looks normal. Either some critical or warning message in a different colour or boldface, or a shape to the messages that I'd recognise. Although in principle I could use various output filters, grep etc., sometimes that's effort and I'd rather just run the thing and have it run quickly. Also it's convenient to have all the output readily available if I do want to look at something that happened, as I can scroll to that place and look at pages of surrounding context in detail. If I use output filters, then I have to faff about re-running the program with different filters, or with all outputs enabled so I can step through everything around the event of interest. Admittedly sometimes its better to output to a file and search the file, but sometimes visual output at 60Hz works quite well. I have been known to skim manuals very fast as well. I guess in the era when man pages were everything, I got used to scrolling really fast to look for things of interest. It's interesting that a brain is able to recognise particular word-forms that flick by extremely fast, much faster than reading them. I've had people tell me they cannot do this, so I guess it's a learned skill.

francislavoie 6y ago

Not having smart copy is a complete dealbreaker to me https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1919 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1919 Windows Terminal has smart copy by default now and the UX improvements of it are a huge difference. I use pantheon-terminal (i.e. the one from elementaryOS) on my linux environments, and the only reason is because it also has smart copy. It means that on all the applications I use, Ctrl+C does _exactly_ what I expect, all the time. I don't want to have to context-switch when I go to a terminal and remember "oh yeah, I need to hold shift too" and accidentally kill the running process like a "tail -f" that I have running for logs on some server. I understand it might be technically difficult to implement, but it means I can't switch to Alacritty without inevitable daily frustration.

moonchild 6y ago
You can try mapping it to super+c/super+v, as macos does. (If apps you use don't support key rebinding, then a little xdotool|autohotkey|autokey magic can do it.)
- francislavoie 6y ago
  I don't use a mac though, and no, very no, thanks. I want my terminal to have the SAME hotkey as every other app on my system, not something different. And I'm not going to relearn Ctrl+C/V with a different hotkey globally. That's too crazy an ask.
  - silon42 6y ago
    Every decent app should support copy paste with ctrl+insert/shift+insert and doesn't conflict with terminal use of control characters... The alternative is to stop using terminal emulators.
smabie 6y ago
I mean, with Xorg, just select and middle click. Am I missing something?

smabie 6y ago

Last time I checked I remembered encountering absolutely horrendous input latency with alacrity, does anyone know if this is still the case?

dsissitka 6y ago
I tested it about a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23954002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23954002 It's pretty much on par with Visual Studio Code. There's also this: https://github.com/dsissitka/dev-env-config/commit/96f162c4bd8cf07a84a19c0c52a0b4cbe58393a9 https://github.com/dsissitka/dev-env-config/commit/96f162c4b... They still claim it's "the fastest terminal emulator in existence."
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  I fought really hard to like alacritty and tune it to be fast and ultimately it was laggy and slow as heck. The rendering pass was abysmal last I checked. If there are too many characters on the screen, fps falls off a cliff. No modern terminal should have render performance of O(n), n=characters. If I hit enter you don't need to re-rasterize all those glyphs.
spanhandler 6y ago
st with tmux is pretty great. Just about the lowest input latency you're likely to find on Linux, AFAIK, and tmux means you need few or no patches to st to have a full-featured term. Not as low-latency as Mac terminal, but then again I don't know of a Linux terminal emulator that is.
- nickjj 6y ago
  The last time I tried st the input latency was quite a bit more than xterm. Noticeable enough to feel the difference when opening them side by side and typing normally. xterm is really as good as it gets if you want a buttery smooth typing experience.
  - 6y ago

riquito 6y ago

Kudos, impressive release

platz 6y ago

I've been using urxvt for some reason.. maybe out of simplicity. It's color range is bad though, though at the same time it's colors are more accurate than if i run xfce4-terminal, for example.

ninjin 6y ago
I migrated from urxvt to Alacritty a little less than six months ago, here are some reflections. Despite all the talk about performance, I find urxvt to be more responsive. However, it is really not something that bothers me during day-to-day usage and I suspect that it will improve over time as urxvt is about as dead as it gets when it comes to a code base. I also ran into some font scaling issues across monitors [1], but I suspect urxvt gets around this mostly by being completely ignorant of things that have happened over the last 20 years. [1]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3465 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3465 Some awesome parts on the side of Alacritty. The community is nice and responsive, documentation good, code modern, and configuring it is straightforward (auto reload upon file edit anyone?). Try getting fallback fonts to work properly with urxvt for example, that is what ultimately drove me away urxvt as the rendering issues I encountered with CJK fonts just drove me up the walls. The worst being somehow shifting the font size depending on whether a character was present in my Japanese font or not. Bonus, I believe the following is sufficient to emulate the look and feel of urxvt in your `.alacritty.yml`: window: padding: x: 2 y: 2 draw_bold_text_with_bright_colors: true
pmoriarty 6y ago
I went from xterm to urxvt (which I used for many years), back to xterm, then to st to alacritty and finally settled on kitty, which I love. kitty has TrueColor support, way more features than aclacritty (which seems to take a more minimalist approach, if I remember right, and this was one of the main reasons I switched from the latter to the former), and in my experience has been both extremely fast and extremely stable. The only thing I really don't like about it is that it seems to copy continuously to the clipboard when I click and drag over some text, so pieces of that text end up cluttering my clipboard history (for which I use parcellite on Linux). The final selection when I finish moving my mouse and let go of my left mouse button works fine, as usual, so I'm willing to live with this... though I'd still prefer it not to copy anything to my clipboard until I've finished clicking and dragging and released my left mouse button.

pacomerh 6y ago

Is it as fast as Kitty now?, last time I check the fastest one was still Kitty (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/)

bjoli 6y ago
It has had a lot higher throughput than Kitty for a long time, but whether it is perceived as faster is a different thing. Some people in this thread say alacritty has high latency, which might make it feel more sluggish.
Jenk 6y ago
Kitty has a better feature set imo, too, but is a shame the author is such an ass about Windows that he refuses to even contemplate support for it.
- KitDuncan 6y ago
  Why does that make him an ass? It's his project, he can do whatever he likes with it.
  - Jenk 6y ago
    It doesn't, it is his attitude when people ask about it that makes him an ass.
ubercow13 6y ago
Kitty seems to have lower latency, and you can feel it, but it has really weird broken font rendering for me.

ducktective 6y ago

So if I'm using Ubuntu, I'm supposed to set-up a Rust toolchain and keep it updated to be able to install Alacritty?

francislavoie 6y ago
The good news is, the rust toolchain is probably one of the easiest to install and update, of almost any programming language. https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install
ncmncm 6y ago
Deal-breaker. But now I know about Kitty, which is supposed to be faster.
abrowne 6y ago
They included a deb until this release :-/ There are packages in the Pop OS PPA[1] I am planning on using. (They haven't added 0.5 yet.). I won't add the PPA, just download and install the deb. It looks like this release has been published to crates.io[2], which was a blocker to getting alacritty packaged in Debian[3], so hopefully soon it will be added and synced to Ubuntu. 1: https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+packages https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+package... 2: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/357#issuecomment-667449072 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/357#issuecomme... 3: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851639 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851639
- abrowne 6y ago
  Version 0.5 has been added: https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+packages?field.name_filter=alacritty&field.status_filter=published&field.series_filter=focal https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+package...

jonny383 6y ago

Been using alacritty on Linux for about a year. After some customisation and key binding setups for tmux, it's easily the best terminal emulator I have used on Linux. Don't know for sure, but it does feel faster and more polished than kitty.

BlackLotus89 6y ago

It's finally usable for me as well [0] Especially for lower end machines like the pinebook pro it's nixe to have a smooth scrolling and rendering experience. The only terminal that renderd without much of a delay on it was st[1] And that I would probably have to patch [2] to get a great experience out of. (it's already good) [0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/128#issuecomment-663927477 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/128#issuecomme... [1] https://st.suckless.org/ https://st.suckless.org/ [2] https://st.suckless.org/patches/ https://st.suckless.org/patches/ Edit: Both terminals kitty and alacritty seem to work now out of the box on my setup.No environment variablres required :)

acdw 6y ago
The one issue I had with st, and it was big enough that I had to switch, was that it crashes on some emoji. It's actually not even an st issue, it's upstream in ... some X font library, I think, but that just means that I can't take my st with me from computer to computer. It sucks, really, because st's great otherwise and it's not even their fault.

DrBazza 6y ago

I've used alacritty, and then just went back to using konsole. I didn't really get any feeling it was 'faster'. Why does every rust project claim to be 'blazing fast'?

rnestler 6y ago
There was a blog post with some benchmarks in 2018: https://jwilm.io/blog/alacritty-lands-scrollback/ https://jwilm.io/blog/alacritty-lands-scrollback/ But not sure if this is still applicable.
- saurik 6y ago
  Some other benchmarks show it as slower, particularly with respect to latency (where I agree with the people who say this is the most important metric: "throughout" has only really ever mattered to me in extreme cases, such as with mintty, which slowly renders all intermediate states); this was brought up in a Hacker News discussion of this link you just posted, and has been discussed elsewhere, such as reddit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006751 https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/8ffddi/alacrittys_not_as_fast_as_we_thought/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/8ffddi/alacrittys_not... The whole "Alacritty is the fastest terminal emulator in existence" just frankly just comes off as dishonest marketing BS given that people even elsewhere here on this thread keep reporting jank issues :/, and it kind of gives the Rust community in general a "bad look" since a lot of projects also claim they are "blazing fast" and it makes you wonder "are you really checking that? are you measuring the right thing?".
  - DrBazza 6y ago
    My comment about rust and 'blazingly fast' is a bit offhand, but my point is just because it's native, doesn't mean it's fast. People can, and do, write crappy slow code in any language. C++ projects (or D, Zig, Nim, Swift, or your native language of choice) don't sell themselves as 'blazingly fast' every single time but all, in principle, produce fast native code.

japaget 6y ago

I tried the portable install on 64-bit Windows 10 1909 Professional and it didn't work. The cursor was stuck in the upper left hand corner and I never got a command prompt.

paedubucher 6y ago

I still have issues that the font is bigger on my laptop screen than on my external screen. This is really annoying.

mklein994 6y ago
I found that changing my keybinding to start alacritty with this environment variable set seems to work: WINIT_X11_SCALE_FACTOR=1.0 alacritty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/commit/93780ef0929e08f3c5212e5451152ecaf1a28813 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/commit/93780ef0929e08...

jedisct1 6y ago

I've been using Alacritty for a while, but eventually got back to the standard Terminal.app and iTerm. The former feels snappier (and is probably GPU-accelerated as well anyway), looks better and comes out of the box. The later has way more features. I just tried Alacritty 0.5, and it has some weird artifacts when text color changes, which happens a lot when the shell highlights commands, or when editing text. Anyway, it's great to have options.

kemayo 6y ago
For what it's worth, iTerm has been GPU-accelerated since 3.2, when it got a new Metal rendering engine: https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_2_0.changelog https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_2_0.changelog

michaelcampbell 6y ago

Thank you for putting a "what this is" paragraph in the referenced page.

jchook 6y ago

All we wanted was tabs, but instead we got... tmux copy mode? Even though we already have to use tmux because... no tabs.