28 ms·

Use Alacritty instead of Termite

249 points by polm23 5y ago

AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
This is a beautiful example of FOSS culture at work. In what world would corporate, closed-source software engage in this kind of earnest truth-telling without the propellers of mergers, acquisitions, or takeovers?
- pluc 5y ago
  I agree, but also in the corporate world there would be incentives for innovation to better compete or finding niche markets. It's not all bad
  - Macha 5y ago
    However, that competition might come in the form of a more effective sales force, rather than a more effective product
    - funcDropShadow 5y ago
      In the floss world that competition could come from more active social media presence, which is marketing - nothing else.
      - robertlagrant 5y ago
        That can still be done better by people paid to do it full time.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Worth noting that the bad behaviour in question they're finally giving up on is from a FOSS project.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Which is why many people have left Xorg. Just because it has outlived its course doesn't reflect negatively on the open source project as a whole.
bhaak 5y ago
> GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use. Choose your dependencies wisely. Sometimes only a crystal ball would have helped but often, a little bit of due dilligence would have prevented lots of upgrade pain down the line.
- dleslie 5y ago
  Gnome has a fairly negative rep now, thanks in part to its repeated spurning of feature requests from developers and users. I remember when the Gnome desktop was exciting; there were frequently new apps to try, things pushing niche workflows that the Gnome team didn't consider. That all stopped with Gnome3.
  - Cloudef 5y ago
    Gnome developers actively hate their users and non-gnome developers. This issue takes the cake: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. To borrow a term or two, it's developed in the bazaar, but run like the cathedral. Maybe an open-air cathedral. Firefox is another project that I'd put under this label. All the important discussions happen in the back rooms, and by the time something universally unpopular hits the bug tracker, it's too late for users or the wider dev community to have any say.
      - zxzax 5y ago
        >Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. That's not been my experience at all. The outrage machine on social media tends to spread around the small handful of patches that do get rejected so they can get angry about it, but they never talk about the other thousands of patches that do get accepted. Go look through all the other MRs on the gitlab if you don't believe me. Yes sometimes patches get rejected, it happens in any open source project.
speeder 5y ago
I've been using Alacritty in Garuda Linux and having a blast with it! It is really awesome! Latte bugs are not though :(
aDfbrtVt 5y ago
Does Alacritty still require you to copy terminfo to remote servers in order for backspace to work? I loved Alacritty, but copying terminfo every time gets old pretty quickly.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  i haven’t observed that behavior at any time.
- shassard 5y ago
  alacritty's default terminal is indeed still quite foreign to most machines but it can fallback to xterm compatibility by overriding the TERM variable in your alacritty.yml: env: TERM: xterm-256color
- Rompect 5y ago
  You can fix this by setting the following values in .config/alacritty/alacritty.yml: env: TERM: xterm-256color Another way is described here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Terminal_functionality_unavailable_in_remote_shells https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Terminal_function...
  - aDfbrtVt 5y ago
    Awesome, thanks for the tip!
  - jchook 5y ago
    Setting TERM this way causes other subtle problems your local host. Instead I set `alias ssh="TERM=xterm-256color ssh"` which works pretty well.
    - nemetroid 5y ago
      What kinds of subtle problems?
- dmm 5y ago
  short-term: Add the terminfo file to your vm provisioning tooling: ansible, terraform, etc long-term: Maintain an alacritty package in your distro of choice so the terminfo is automatically included
cies 5y ago
And slowly the world got a rewrite in Rust… :)
- bionade24 5y ago
  RiR wouldn't be a meme and so controversial if the Rewriters didn't often rewrite common tools strongly opinionated, excluding everyone from a potential merge discussion of new features.
siver_john 5y ago
I find this kind of interaction interesting having used both termite and alacritty. Honestly I would have never expected maintainers of what I perceived as a fairly popular terminal to just go, welp use the other guys. This is kind of neat. I had already been using alacritty for a while because it had wayland support, even though it has some weird bugs on my current i3 setup where creating a new terminal just creates an unresponsive window that has to be killed through htop. Other than that it's been great, and there is something satisfying about cat /udev/random and the text that flies by with GPU acceleration.
- twic 5y ago
  I think the explanation lies here: > VTE is a terrible base for building a modern, fast and safe terminal emulator. It's slow, brittle and difficult to improve. It sounds like the maintainers of termite had a miserable time dealing with VTE, and are glad to see the back of it.
  - siver_john 5y ago
    I mean I get that, but they could have just said we're no longer developing this, because we're tired or whatever. I just think it's interesting they made such a strong stand.
    - rektide 5y ago
      dev started with the hubris to try to do better. the laziness to find supposedly good libraries to work atop. and his impatience at a resistant, inflexible library resulted in them warding others off againat similar folly. a three virtues mini saga if I've heard of one, http://threevirtues.com/ http://threevirtues.com/
    - codethief 5y ago
      Given with how the conversation went in the Bugzilla ticket[0] that Daniel Micay linked, I can't say that I blame him. Make sure to scroll all the way down to comment #26 where the devs say: > This bug is closed and this patch rejected […] Adding keyboard selection to vte will be done inside vte, see bug 78291 [1] – a bug which is 19 (in words: nineteen) years old. [0]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679658 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679658 [1]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78291 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78291
kohlerm 5y ago
I liked termite because of the keyboard based selection mode and the minimal functionality. Wasn't aware that Alacrity supports that now. Alacrity is my choice for Windows, but unfortunately I cannot use it on WSL2, because it needs GLX features, which are not available. I hope I can soon use the new WSL2 graphics support
- hyperpl 5y ago
  I didn't know alacrity was supported on Windows. Can it be used in place of putty as well?
  - Iwan-Zotow 5y ago
    Is it better than native Windows terminal?
    - Bjartr 5y ago
      The new Windows Terminal or the old Command Prompt?
      - Iwan-Zotow 5y ago
        new one
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  > unfortunately I cannot use it on WSL2 I’m confused by what you’re saying here, because I can’t think of any particularly compelling reason to run Alacritty inside WSL beyond ease of installation. You can run the Windows Alacritty from WSL2 with no trouble (like any other .exe file), and you can run WSL stuff inside Alacritty. Admittedly spawning something WSL-side inside Alacritty from the WSL side becomes a smidgeon more complicated, because you’ll need to rewrite any `alacritty --command …` to run it through wsl.exe or your distro-specific launcher. But even if you need to do that, that should be pretty much set-and-forget with a little wrapper shell script. Have I misunderstood the reason for your remark?
ljosa 5y ago
Alacrity works well on MacOS also. It gives you enough control that you can send meta (command) properly to readline, emacs, and whatever else is running in the terminal while letting some command chords be handled outside the terminal (e.g., command-tab, copy/paste, rectangle).
- mbil 5y ago
  Command-tab is slightly broken for me. When Alacritty is full screen, command-tab often switches to the desktop instead of Alacritty. It’s my only complaint, but it’s pretty annoying and disruptive. https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3659 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3659
cookguyruffles 5y ago
Is there any indication of the energy impact using a GL context to render plain old text? These concepts seem incompatible in the context of a laptop, and who needs GL here when the bottleneck is biological. One of my favourite working modes is shutting down everything and just hacking away in vim, partly for distraction management but primarily because of battery.
- traverseda 5y ago
  Everything is a GL context under wayland isn't it?
  - Cloudef 5y ago
    It's technically possible to create a wayland compositor without GL/GLES/Vulkan, but only SHM clients will work, unless you go with mixed approach which wouldn't be zero-copy. (Or of course you could also use llvmpipe or something to do software emulation of GL, but that will be very slow and ineffective). I'm not aware of any such wayland compositor however.
- halz 5y ago
  There is at lease one open issue¹ with the clipboard crate that causes a high amount of wakeups (under Wayland at least). Whatmore, the wakeups scale with the number of terminals open. The project is ruthless about performance[latency] regressions, but not so much about performance[energy] overhead. [¹https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3108 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3108]
  - Narishma 5y ago
    They seem to care more about throughput than latency.
    - jorams 5y ago
      Yes, which seems very very weird to me. When it launched they immediately marketed it as super fast, but just typing into it had noticeable latency. Throughput is great if a command is producing massive amounts of output, but it's not like you're going to read at that speed. I can usually pipe into less instead. I hope latency has improved to be much better. Haven't tried it in a few years.
bionade24 5y ago
When stepping away from KDE to sway, tried diffrent terminal emulators, but especially compared konsole, termite & alacritty. Back then (October 2020) I found alacritty to have really slow startup times on high-end machines (and got confirmation that's it's not my fault on IRC). Even massive Konsole started up faster. It also treats Wayland badly. So I settled with Termite, which I really like so far. It's sad that it's discontinued, but it's a shame that alacritty should be _the_ replacement for it.
- hashkb 5y ago
  I've been using Alacrity/Sway for at least that long, and it's been perfect. Maybe I have a low end machine. How does it misbehave on Wayland?
  - bionade24 5y ago
    I believe it was about copy/pasting with wl-clipboard, which didn't worked. May have to try it now again.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      I’ve been on Sway for a few weeks now. Copy and paste worked immediately in Alacritty (without installing wl-clipboard), and it starts in less than 100ms with a warm cache (on a new and powerful laptop).
    - bionade24 5y ago
      I retried and it now works fine on all my new and old machines. Seems like the bugs are solved.
  - Macha 5y ago
    There does seem to be some machines that Alacritty runs poorly on, but there doesn't seem to be a pattern of hardware vendor/OS or anything. On one of 3 machines I run it on (work MBP, personal laptop on Arch, personal desktop on Arch), I see the slow startups people comment on. I always assumed it was just a mac port issue, but I've seen others comment that it works fine on Mac, or that it doesn't work fine on Linux. It's not directly spec related either, as the work MBP is more powerful than my personal laptop
kilodeca 5y ago
How about Foot? https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot
- abrowne 5y ago
  It's Wayland-only, right? Alacritty OTOH not only works on X11, but is cross-platform.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    X11's been EOL'd, dude.
    - dsr_ 5y ago
      And yet everybody still uses it except the developers.
      - Seirdy 5y ago
        I wouldn't go that far. Most distros have switched to GNOME on Wayland by default, and Fedora 34's KDE spin has switched to Wayland too. Sway is niche but not insignificant anymore (I use Sway). X11 is definitely not dead yet, though. FLTK programs, Wine, and some game engines still require X11.
    - fullstop 5y ago
      I keep going back to X11 for various reasons. I was close last time, but google chrome still has various problems with wayland if one has more than one window open. I know that this is a chrome bug, but it ruins the experience and for this use case I can not use Firefox.
      - abrowne 5y ago
        Same. I'm slowly switching from GNOME to Sway, but I'm not going 100% until Chromium's Wayland support is better, since I spend 98% of my time in Chromium or VS Code. The good news is they are actively working on it since ChromeOS will (does?) use Wayland so they can split the Chromium browser from the Chromium that runs the OS shell.
bennyp101 5y ago
I used to use termite, but switched to kitty for ... reasons I can't remember now. Does alacritty support ligatures yet? I've been using kitty because it does, but then I have issues with tmux in kitty ... I know, I want my cake and eat it
- shi_tty 5y ago
  Lots of things alacritty cannot do- 1) If you scale certain fonts using fontconfig, alacritty would ignore that. 2) No emoji colors, no ligatures (and thus no flags), also emoji size has problems ... and not to mention it's one of the slowest (yes! contrary to what they blowhard they response time to keys is very large) terminals out there. List is endless, termite had its place, but there is no doubt that there is so much ego in OSS that one solution canot fit all Personally I'm keeping an eye out for wezterm, it seems all the good things of alacritty without the self-congratulation part
  - Rompect 5y ago
    Account created: 10 minutes ago Comments: 1
  - creata 5y ago
    > contrary to what they blowhard they response time to keys is very large They state explicitly on their README that they're measuring throughput, not latency. Besides that, all three of your complaints are true as far as I'm aware, and they are major dealbreakers.
  - dbrgn 5y ago
    > 2) No emoji colors Colored emoji are working fine in my alacritty terminal. Here's my fontconfig file: https://github.com/dbrgn/dotfiles/blob/master/fonts.conf https://github.com/dbrgn/dotfiles/blob/master/fonts.conf
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Colored emojis work fine, but for ligatures you need kitty as far as I'm aware. I ran into this when attempt internationalization of a website.
Cloudef 5y ago
Used to use termite for years before moving to alacritty, I'm glad it has keyboard hints navigation now. Thanks thestinger for the great terminal emulator.
nathias 5y ago
Alacritty is very slow on startup, I use a tiling manager and spawn new terminals frequently so this is very noticeable. I use st which is super fast and has everything I need available through patches
- Cloudef 5y ago
  This might have something to do with the GPU you use. Alacritty spawns instantly for me on AMD GPU with mesa drivers.
- dmm 5y ago
  > Alacritty is very slow on startup Can you quantify that? Are you talking multiple countable seconds to open? It seems to open instantly for me but I can't tell if your talking about 0.5s or 5s being slow.
  - nathias 5y ago
    It's slow when relying on opening to be instantaneous so 0.5s feels very slow. I need it to be around 0.05s.
markstos 5y ago
Alacritty is obsoleted by Foot: https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/n6kznh/yes_welcome_to_the_future/ https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/n6kznh/yes_welcome_... https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  If you get it added to the standard Arch repo then I'll try it out.
- spijdar 5y ago
  Not if you: a) use an OS besides Linux (and whichever other unix-likes that have wayland compat now, last I hear FreeBSD had ... some degree of support), and/or b) don't use wayland. Alacritty even works on Windows!
fullstop 5y ago
alacritty's lack of tabs absolutely killed it for me. They are not open to the idea of adding tabs, either.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  True, but tabs are something built into tiling window managers like Sway. If you want a fast terminal with tabs then I'd recommend kitty.
  - fullstop 5y ago
    Can you group tabs in Sway? I have a lot of tabs open and each window represents a specific group. I navigate primarily by keyboard, and having grouped tabs keeps me organized. I'll give Kitty a shot. I've been using konsole recently and it works for the most part, except when sending files through picocom. ctrl-a+s pops up a message about terminal flow control even though the keystroke is intercepted by picocom and not used for flow control.
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      Yes, you can do it through the config or by using shortcuts to switch a group of windows into tabs. I'd also recommend tmux and tmuxp.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      Yes. Sway represents the world as a tree. You can nest containers as you like. e.g. H[firefox T[Alacritty Alacritty]] describes a horizontal split with Firefox on the left side and a tab container of two Alacrittys on the right side. If you want H[S[T[T[Alacritty Alacritty] H[Alacritty Alacritty] Alacritty] V[Alacritty Alacritty]] Alacritty], go wild! When you subsequently want to move a group of things around, you can focus the parent container and move it around as though it were a window. (Out of the box, Super+a is `focus parent`, though curiously there’s no `focus child` binding in the default config, so to return to a child you pretty much have to focus a sibling or another container, or use the mouse.)
mLuby 5y ago
"Obsoleted" is a word? I've only heard "made obsolete" before, or replaced/discontinued/deprecated.
- declnz 5y ago
  I guess obsolete got verbed...
- tnzm 5y ago
  Verbing weirds language.
- detaro 5y ago
  yes, it is. Even in dictionaries, e.g. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obsolete https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obsolete
  - mLuby 5y ago
    Yeah wow TIL it's been around least since the 1730s. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=obsoleted https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=obsoleted
- gaucheph 5y ago
  I've seen "obviate" or "obviated" used in these situations.
- shi_tty 5y ago
  Thank you for adding to the discussion.
enriquto 5y ago
I have no beef with gtk/gnome and the like, but I find it really funny when developers use such colorful language. Still, as a heavy terminal user, I fail to understand what's the big deal with the choice of terminal. I have used only xterm for more than 20 years (with a short stint with gnome-terminal, and I didn't find any relevant difference). It starts instantaneously and doesn't make any fuss while it's running. Is there anything important that I'm losing?
- oblio 5y ago
  Tabs, panes, scrollback search, if you're not using tmux & co. (not talking about alacritty, but about more advanced terminals, in general). Clickable links.
- db48x 5y ago
  Speed. A terminal’s job is most just to print text on the screen. You might be surprised at just how slowly that can be done.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    Never had a problem with xterm's speed. In fact, it seemed snappier than gnome-terminal, especially when maximized.
    - db48x 5y ago
      Yea, xterm certainly isn’t the worst of the lot.
- zests 5y ago
  Many terminals lack ligatures. Once I started using a monospace font with ligatures I could never go back.
  - codemac 5y ago
    Best font + terminal combinations to try this with?
pdenton 5y ago
Unfortunately, Alacritty seems broken to me. See https://files.catbox.moe/0agd5p.png https://files.catbox.moe/0agd5p.png (Look at the box drawing characters.)
noisy_boy 5y ago
I have been using Tilix[0] - pretty happy with it. Nice tab features, profiles/theming, quick startup, excellent rendering. Nothing to complain so far. [0]: https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/
- commoner 5y ago
  Tilix is an excellent terminal emulator, but it's not adding any new features until it gets a new maintainer. Anyone familiar with the D programming language (similar to C/C++) is welcome to apply. https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/issues/1700 https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/issues/1700
apocolyps6 5y ago
I was considering switching to Alacritty earlier this week, but a quick look at some github issues changed my mind. The devs come off super toxic. Take a look at this guy that got verbal abuse for pointing out the color labeled "green" looks more like banana than lime: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1561 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1561 Strike 2/2 was multiple devs responding to OSX issues with "switch operating systems"
- vlovich123 5y ago
  That was my conclusion as well after my limited interactions with them. I no longer use it.
- CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
  Oof, that interaction was uncomfortable. Definitely a very bad look for that dev.
  - apocolyps6 5y ago
    The other dev chiming in at the end with "I've heard only good things about Alacritty's default colorscheme so far" was also frustrating. Saying "well nobody else complained" is an awful reason to dismiss an issue.
    - Sleepytime 5y ago
      Considering this is their reaction to someone pointing out that their green is actually yellow, I'm not surprised that they are in an echo chamber.
      - hitekker 5y ago
        Echo chamber is one term, another would be tribe. An insecure group member feels threatened by an outsider and lashes out. Another group member sees an outsider triggering a group member and he immediately jumps into help. Together, they attack the outsider and drive him off. I think if the maintainer was less insecure and more able to take critique, the exchange wouldn't have aroused the "fight or flight" instincts of the group.
Datenstrom 5y ago
I have never used Termite but I used Terminator many years for more features but mostly the window splits, I have also done a lot of Rust development so when I heard about Alacritty I gave it a test drive. One thing I did was run `find /` with Terminator and Alacritty side by side and Alacritty finished about an order of magnitude faster. So I switched to tmux for tiling and use Alacritty now, not that I regularly dump so much text so quickly on the terminal but I was impressed with the engineering. I have been happy with it.
jah 5y ago
I've been running urxvt with tmux in a tiling window manager for the last decade. What features from these new terminal emulators am I missing out on?
- shi_tty 5y ago
  hyperlinks-- programs can emit an escape code that would be interpreted as hyperlink. so you can do `ls --hyperlink=auto` (yes, it's so useful that a coreutils util has included it) and click on the hyperlink to open the file using xdg-open. Also, vim: `help modifyOtherKeys`. emojis
- kzrdude 5y ago
  kitty has ligatures and inline images support. Inline images go right out the window if using a terminal multiplexer though, unfortunately.
marshallward 5y ago
I tried to switch maybe a year ago, but alacritty was measurably slower and heavier than termite, so I dropped it. Now I concede that I did not personally notice any difference, aside from the usual config changes, but surely there is still a case for a CPU side VTE based terminal? Or am I wrong?
joshsyn 5y ago
iterm2 is good enough for most of my use case. Download iterm2 and install lovelace. Done!
p5a0u9l 5y ago
I’ve tried alacritty a few times and found it not ready for daily use. My work has me on Windows and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the newer Windows Terminal app. Uses the GPU for rendering (iirc the basis for alacritty’s performance claims).
pkulak 5y ago
Right when this happens: https://i.redd.it/5buckgok5lx61.png https://i.redd.it/5buckgok5lx61.png What am I to do???
fnord77 5y ago
problem at least on OS X is none of these term replacements render fonts as well as the native term.
miguelmota 5y ago
I’ve tried xterm, terminator, termite, urxvt, st, kitty, and gnome-terminal but Alacritty is my go to because of it’s speed and simplicity. Alacritty has no menus, no tabs, no scroll bars, and configuration is done via a single config file. I pair it with tmux. The only minor thing I wished Alacritty would support is font ligatures.
harryruhr 5y ago
I still use xterm with a bitmap font plus tmux. Low on resources, fast and all features I need.
vnhnhm 5y ago
I hope it "obsoletes" kitty as well https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544#issuecomment-828592113 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544#issuecomment-8...
0xbeefeed 5y ago
I don't know why would anyone use Alacritty. Don't tell me that tabs aren't important, and don't tell me to "use tmux" as a replacement. Plus, Alacritty is slow as fuck compared to every other terminal I've used (I haven't used iTerm2). Its only selling point is "written in Rust" which isn't enough for me.

249 points by polm23 5y ago

This is a beautiful example of FOSS culture at work. In what world would corporate, closed-source software engage in this kind of earnest truth-telling without the propellers of mergers, acquisitions, or takeovers?

pluc 5y ago
I agree, but also in the corporate world there would be incentives for innovation to better compete or finding niche markets. It's not all bad
- Macha 5y ago
  However, that competition might come in the form of a more effective sales force, rather than a more effective product
  - funcDropShadow 5y ago
    In the floss world that competition could come from more active social media presence, which is marketing - nothing else.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      That can still be done better by people paid to do it full time.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Worth noting that the bad behaviour in question they're finally giving up on is from a FOSS project.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Which is why many people have left Xorg. Just because it has outlived its course doesn't reflect negatively on the open source project as a whole.

bhaak 5y ago

> GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use. Choose your dependencies wisely. Sometimes only a crystal ball would have helped but often, a little bit of due dilligence would have prevented lots of upgrade pain down the line.

dleslie 5y ago
Gnome has a fairly negative rep now, thanks in part to its repeated spurning of feature requests from developers and users. I remember when the Gnome desktop was exciting; there were frequently new apps to try, things pushing niche workflows that the Gnome team didn't consider. That all stopped with Gnome3.
- Cloudef 5y ago
  Gnome developers actively hate their users and non-gnome developers. This issue takes the cake: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. To borrow a term or two, it's developed in the bazaar, but run like the cathedral. Maybe an open-air cathedral. Firefox is another project that I'd put under this label. All the important discussions happen in the back rooms, and by the time something universally unpopular hits the bug tracker, it's too late for users or the wider dev community to have any say.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      >Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. That's not been my experience at all. The outrage machine on social media tends to spread around the small handful of patches that do get rejected so they can get angry about it, but they never talk about the other thousands of patches that do get accepted. Go look through all the other MRs on the gitlab if you don't believe me. Yes sometimes patches get rejected, it happens in any open source project.

speeder 5y ago

I've been using Alacritty in Garuda Linux and having a blast with it! It is really awesome! Latte bugs are not though :(

aDfbrtVt 5y ago

Does Alacritty still require you to copy terminfo to remote servers in order for backspace to work? I loved Alacritty, but copying terminfo every time gets old pretty quickly.

hprotagonist 5y ago
i haven’t observed that behavior at any time.
shassard 5y ago
alacritty's default terminal is indeed still quite foreign to most machines but it can fallback to xterm compatibility by overriding the TERM variable in your alacritty.yml: env: TERM: xterm-256color
Rompect 5y ago
You can fix this by setting the following values in .config/alacritty/alacritty.yml: env: TERM: xterm-256color Another way is described here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Terminal_functionality_unavailable_in_remote_shells https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Terminal_function...
- aDfbrtVt 5y ago
  Awesome, thanks for the tip!
- jchook 5y ago
  Setting TERM this way causes other subtle problems your local host. Instead I set `alias ssh="TERM=xterm-256color ssh"` which works pretty well.
  - nemetroid 5y ago
    What kinds of subtle problems?
dmm 5y ago
short-term: Add the terminfo file to your vm provisioning tooling: ansible, terraform, etc long-term: Maintain an alacritty package in your distro of choice so the terminfo is automatically included

cies 5y ago

And slowly the world got a rewrite in Rust… :)

bionade24 5y ago
RiR wouldn't be a meme and so controversial if the Rewriters didn't often rewrite common tools strongly opinionated, excluding everyone from a potential merge discussion of new features.

siver_john 5y ago

I find this kind of interaction interesting having used both termite and alacritty. Honestly I would have never expected maintainers of what I perceived as a fairly popular terminal to just go, welp use the other guys. This is kind of neat. I had already been using alacritty for a while because it had wayland support, even though it has some weird bugs on my current i3 setup where creating a new terminal just creates an unresponsive window that has to be killed through htop. Other than that it's been great, and there is something satisfying about cat /udev/random and the text that flies by with GPU acceleration.

twic 5y ago
I think the explanation lies here: > VTE is a terrible base for building a modern, fast and safe terminal emulator. It's slow, brittle and difficult to improve. It sounds like the maintainers of termite had a miserable time dealing with VTE, and are glad to see the back of it.
- siver_john 5y ago
  I mean I get that, but they could have just said we're no longer developing this, because we're tired or whatever. I just think it's interesting they made such a strong stand.
  - rektide 5y ago
    dev started with the hubris to try to do better. the laziness to find supposedly good libraries to work atop. and his impatience at a resistant, inflexible library resulted in them warding others off againat similar folly. a three virtues mini saga if I've heard of one, http://threevirtues.com/ http://threevirtues.com/
  - codethief 5y ago
    Given with how the conversation went in the Bugzilla ticket[0] that Daniel Micay linked, I can't say that I blame him. Make sure to scroll all the way down to comment #26 where the devs say: > This bug is closed and this patch rejected […] Adding keyboard selection to vte will be done inside vte, see bug 78291 [1] – a bug which is 19 (in words: nineteen) years old. [0]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679658 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679658 [1]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78291 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78291

kohlerm 5y ago

I liked termite because of the keyboard based selection mode and the minimal functionality. Wasn't aware that Alacrity supports that now. Alacrity is my choice for Windows, but unfortunately I cannot use it on WSL2, because it needs GLX features, which are not available. I hope I can soon use the new WSL2 graphics support

hyperpl 5y ago
I didn't know alacrity was supported on Windows. Can it be used in place of putty as well?
- Iwan-Zotow 5y ago
  Is it better than native Windows terminal?
  - Bjartr 5y ago
    The new Windows Terminal or the old Command Prompt?
    - Iwan-Zotow 5y ago
      new one
chrismorgan 5y ago
> unfortunately I cannot use it on WSL2 I’m confused by what you’re saying here, because I can’t think of any particularly compelling reason to run Alacritty inside WSL beyond ease of installation. You can run the Windows Alacritty from WSL2 with no trouble (like any other .exe file), and you can run WSL stuff inside Alacritty. Admittedly spawning something WSL-side inside Alacritty from the WSL side becomes a smidgeon more complicated, because you’ll need to rewrite any `alacritty --command …` to run it through wsl.exe or your distro-specific launcher. But even if you need to do that, that should be pretty much set-and-forget with a little wrapper shell script. Have I misunderstood the reason for your remark?

ljosa 5y ago

Alacrity works well on MacOS also. It gives you enough control that you can send meta (command) properly to readline, emacs, and whatever else is running in the terminal while letting some command chords be handled outside the terminal (e.g., command-tab, copy/paste, rectangle).

mbil 5y ago
Command-tab is slightly broken for me. When Alacritty is full screen, command-tab often switches to the desktop instead of Alacritty. It’s my only complaint, but it’s pretty annoying and disruptive. https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3659 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3659

cookguyruffles 5y ago

Is there any indication of the energy impact using a GL context to render plain old text? These concepts seem incompatible in the context of a laptop, and who needs GL here when the bottleneck is biological. One of my favourite working modes is shutting down everything and just hacking away in vim, partly for distraction management but primarily because of battery.

traverseda 5y ago
Everything is a GL context under wayland isn't it?
- Cloudef 5y ago
  It's technically possible to create a wayland compositor without GL/GLES/Vulkan, but only SHM clients will work, unless you go with mixed approach which wouldn't be zero-copy. (Or of course you could also use llvmpipe or something to do software emulation of GL, but that will be very slow and ineffective). I'm not aware of any such wayland compositor however.
halz 5y ago
There is at lease one open issue¹ with the clipboard crate that causes a high amount of wakeups (under Wayland at least). Whatmore, the wakeups scale with the number of terminals open. The project is ruthless about performance[latency] regressions, but not so much about performance[energy] overhead. [¹https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3108 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3108]
- Narishma 5y ago
  They seem to care more about throughput than latency.
  - jorams 5y ago
    Yes, which seems very very weird to me. When it launched they immediately marketed it as super fast, but just typing into it had noticeable latency. Throughput is great if a command is producing massive amounts of output, but it's not like you're going to read at that speed. I can usually pipe into less instead. I hope latency has improved to be much better. Haven't tried it in a few years.

bionade24 5y ago

When stepping away from KDE to sway, tried diffrent terminal emulators, but especially compared konsole, termite & alacritty. Back then (October 2020) I found alacritty to have really slow startup times on high-end machines (and got confirmation that's it's not my fault on IRC). Even massive Konsole started up faster. It also treats Wayland badly. So I settled with Termite, which I really like so far. It's sad that it's discontinued, but it's a shame that alacritty should be _the_ replacement for it.

hashkb 5y ago
I've been using Alacrity/Sway for at least that long, and it's been perfect. Maybe I have a low end machine. How does it misbehave on Wayland?
- bionade24 5y ago
  I believe it was about copy/pasting with wl-clipboard, which didn't worked. May have to try it now again.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    I’ve been on Sway for a few weeks now. Copy and paste worked immediately in Alacritty (without installing wl-clipboard), and it starts in less than 100ms with a warm cache (on a new and powerful laptop).
  - bionade24 5y ago
    I retried and it now works fine on all my new and old machines. Seems like the bugs are solved.
- Macha 5y ago
  There does seem to be some machines that Alacritty runs poorly on, but there doesn't seem to be a pattern of hardware vendor/OS or anything. On one of 3 machines I run it on (work MBP, personal laptop on Arch, personal desktop on Arch), I see the slow startups people comment on. I always assumed it was just a mac port issue, but I've seen others comment that it works fine on Mac, or that it doesn't work fine on Linux. It's not directly spec related either, as the work MBP is more powerful than my personal laptop

kilodeca 5y ago

How about Foot? https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

abrowne 5y ago
It's Wayland-only, right? Alacritty OTOH not only works on X11, but is cross-platform.
- bitwize 5y ago
  X11's been EOL'd, dude.
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    And yet everybody still uses it except the developers.
    - Seirdy 5y ago
      I wouldn't go that far. Most distros have switched to GNOME on Wayland by default, and Fedora 34's KDE spin has switched to Wayland too. Sway is niche but not insignificant anymore (I use Sway). X11 is definitely not dead yet, though. FLTK programs, Wine, and some game engines still require X11.
  - fullstop 5y ago
    I keep going back to X11 for various reasons. I was close last time, but google chrome still has various problems with wayland if one has more than one window open. I know that this is a chrome bug, but it ruins the experience and for this use case I can not use Firefox.
    - abrowne 5y ago
      Same. I'm slowly switching from GNOME to Sway, but I'm not going 100% until Chromium's Wayland support is better, since I spend 98% of my time in Chromium or VS Code. The good news is they are actively working on it since ChromeOS will (does?) use Wayland so they can split the Chromium browser from the Chromium that runs the OS shell.

bennyp101 5y ago

I used to use termite, but switched to kitty for ... reasons I can't remember now. Does alacritty support ligatures yet? I've been using kitty because it does, but then I have issues with tmux in kitty ... I know, I want my cake and eat it

shi_tty 5y ago
Lots of things alacritty cannot do- 1) If you scale certain fonts using fontconfig, alacritty would ignore that. 2) No emoji colors, no ligatures (and thus no flags), also emoji size has problems ... and not to mention it's one of the slowest (yes! contrary to what they blowhard they response time to keys is very large) terminals out there. List is endless, termite had its place, but there is no doubt that there is so much ego in OSS that one solution canot fit all Personally I'm keeping an eye out for wezterm, it seems all the good things of alacritty without the self-congratulation part
- Rompect 5y ago
  Account created: 10 minutes ago Comments: 1
- creata 5y ago
  > contrary to what they blowhard they response time to keys is very large They state explicitly on their README that they're measuring throughput, not latency. Besides that, all three of your complaints are true as far as I'm aware, and they are major dealbreakers.
- dbrgn 5y ago
  > 2) No emoji colors Colored emoji are working fine in my alacritty terminal. Here's my fontconfig file: https://github.com/dbrgn/dotfiles/blob/master/fonts.conf https://github.com/dbrgn/dotfiles/blob/master/fonts.conf
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Colored emojis work fine, but for ligatures you need kitty as far as I'm aware. I ran into this when attempt internationalization of a website.

Cloudef 5y ago

Used to use termite for years before moving to alacritty, I'm glad it has keyboard hints navigation now. Thanks thestinger for the great terminal emulator.

nathias 5y ago

Alacritty is very slow on startup, I use a tiling manager and spawn new terminals frequently so this is very noticeable. I use st which is super fast and has everything I need available through patches

Cloudef 5y ago
This might have something to do with the GPU you use. Alacritty spawns instantly for me on AMD GPU with mesa drivers.
dmm 5y ago
> Alacritty is very slow on startup Can you quantify that? Are you talking multiple countable seconds to open? It seems to open instantly for me but I can't tell if your talking about 0.5s or 5s being slow.
- nathias 5y ago
  It's slow when relying on opening to be instantaneous so 0.5s feels very slow. I need it to be around 0.05s.

markstos 5y ago

Alacritty is obsoleted by Foot: https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/n6kznh/yes_welcome_to_the_future/ https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/n6kznh/yes_welcome_... https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

encryptluks2 5y ago
If you get it added to the standard Arch repo then I'll try it out.
spijdar 5y ago
Not if you: a) use an OS besides Linux (and whichever other unix-likes that have wayland compat now, last I hear FreeBSD had ... some degree of support), and/or b) don't use wayland. Alacritty even works on Windows!

fullstop 5y ago

alacritty's lack of tabs absolutely killed it for me. They are not open to the idea of adding tabs, either.

encryptluks2 5y ago
True, but tabs are something built into tiling window managers like Sway. If you want a fast terminal with tabs then I'd recommend kitty.
- fullstop 5y ago
  Can you group tabs in Sway? I have a lot of tabs open and each window represents a specific group. I navigate primarily by keyboard, and having grouped tabs keeps me organized. I'll give Kitty a shot. I've been using konsole recently and it works for the most part, except when sending files through picocom. ctrl-a+s pops up a message about terminal flow control even though the keystroke is intercepted by picocom and not used for flow control.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Yes, you can do it through the config or by using shortcuts to switch a group of windows into tabs. I'd also recommend tmux and tmuxp.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    Yes. Sway represents the world as a tree. You can nest containers as you like. e.g. H[firefox T[Alacritty Alacritty]] describes a horizontal split with Firefox on the left side and a tab container of two Alacrittys on the right side. If you want H[S[T[T[Alacritty Alacritty] H[Alacritty Alacritty] Alacritty] V[Alacritty Alacritty]] Alacritty], go wild! When you subsequently want to move a group of things around, you can focus the parent container and move it around as though it were a window. (Out of the box, Super+a is `focus parent`, though curiously there’s no `focus child` binding in the default config, so to return to a child you pretty much have to focus a sibling or another container, or use the mouse.)

mLuby 5y ago

"Obsoleted" is a word? I've only heard "made obsolete" before, or replaced/discontinued/deprecated.

declnz 5y ago
I guess obsolete got verbed...
tnzm 5y ago
Verbing weirds language.
detaro 5y ago
yes, it is. Even in dictionaries, e.g. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obsolete https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obsolete
- mLuby 5y ago
  Yeah wow TIL it's been around least since the 1730s. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=obsoleted https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=obsoleted
gaucheph 5y ago
I've seen "obviate" or "obviated" used in these situations.
shi_tty 5y ago
Thank you for adding to the discussion.

enriquto 5y ago

I have no beef with gtk/gnome and the like, but I find it really funny when developers use such colorful language. Still, as a heavy terminal user, I fail to understand what's the big deal with the choice of terminal. I have used only xterm for more than 20 years (with a short stint with gnome-terminal, and I didn't find any relevant difference). It starts instantaneously and doesn't make any fuss while it's running. Is there anything important that I'm losing?

oblio 5y ago
Tabs, panes, scrollback search, if you're not using tmux & co. (not talking about alacritty, but about more advanced terminals, in general). Clickable links.
db48x 5y ago
Speed. A terminal’s job is most just to print text on the screen. You might be surprised at just how slowly that can be done.
- enriquto 5y ago
  Never had a problem with xterm's speed. In fact, it seemed snappier than gnome-terminal, especially when maximized.
  - db48x 5y ago
    Yea, xterm certainly isn’t the worst of the lot.
zests 5y ago
Many terminals lack ligatures. Once I started using a monospace font with ligatures I could never go back.
- codemac 5y ago
  Best font + terminal combinations to try this with?

pdenton 5y ago

Unfortunately, Alacritty seems broken to me. See https://files.catbox.moe/0agd5p.png https://files.catbox.moe/0agd5p.png (Look at the box drawing characters.)

noisy_boy 5y ago

I have been using Tilix[0] - pretty happy with it. Nice tab features, profiles/theming, quick startup, excellent rendering. Nothing to complain so far. [0]: https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/ https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/

commoner 5y ago
Tilix is an excellent terminal emulator, but it's not adding any new features until it gets a new maintainer. Anyone familiar with the D programming language (similar to C/C++) is welcome to apply. https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/issues/1700 https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/issues/1700

apocolyps6 5y ago

I was considering switching to Alacritty earlier this week, but a quick look at some github issues changed my mind. The devs come off super toxic. Take a look at this guy that got verbal abuse for pointing out the color labeled "green" looks more like banana than lime: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1561 https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1561 Strike 2/2 was multiple devs responding to OSX issues with "switch operating systems"

vlovich123 5y ago
That was my conclusion as well after my limited interactions with them. I no longer use it.
CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
Oof, that interaction was uncomfortable. Definitely a very bad look for that dev.
- apocolyps6 5y ago
  The other dev chiming in at the end with "I've heard only good things about Alacritty's default colorscheme so far" was also frustrating. Saying "well nobody else complained" is an awful reason to dismiss an issue.
  - Sleepytime 5y ago
    Considering this is their reaction to someone pointing out that their green is actually yellow, I'm not surprised that they are in an echo chamber.
    - hitekker 5y ago
      Echo chamber is one term, another would be tribe. An insecure group member feels threatened by an outsider and lashes out. Another group member sees an outsider triggering a group member and he immediately jumps into help. Together, they attack the outsider and drive him off. I think if the maintainer was less insecure and more able to take critique, the exchange wouldn't have aroused the "fight or flight" instincts of the group.

Datenstrom 5y ago

I have never used Termite but I used Terminator many years for more features but mostly the window splits, I have also done a lot of Rust development so when I heard about Alacritty I gave it a test drive. One thing I did was run `find /` with Terminator and Alacritty side by side and Alacritty finished about an order of magnitude faster. So I switched to tmux for tiling and use Alacritty now, not that I regularly dump so much text so quickly on the terminal but I was impressed with the engineering. I have been happy with it.

jah 5y ago

I've been running urxvt with tmux in a tiling window manager for the last decade. What features from these new terminal emulators am I missing out on?

shi_tty 5y ago
hyperlinks-- programs can emit an escape code that would be interpreted as hyperlink. so you can do `ls --hyperlink=auto` (yes, it's so useful that a coreutils util has included it) and click on the hyperlink to open the file using xdg-open. Also, vim: `help modifyOtherKeys`. emojis
kzrdude 5y ago
kitty has ligatures and inline images support. Inline images go right out the window if using a terminal multiplexer though, unfortunately.

marshallward 5y ago

I tried to switch maybe a year ago, but alacritty was measurably slower and heavier than termite, so I dropped it. Now I concede that I did not personally notice any difference, aside from the usual config changes, but surely there is still a case for a CPU side VTE based terminal? Or am I wrong?

joshsyn 5y ago

iterm2 is good enough for most of my use case. Download iterm2 and install lovelace. Done!

p5a0u9l 5y ago

I’ve tried alacritty a few times and found it not ready for daily use. My work has me on Windows and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the newer Windows Terminal app. Uses the GPU for rendering (iirc the basis for alacritty’s performance claims).

pkulak 5y ago

Right when this happens: https://i.redd.it/5buckgok5lx61.png https://i.redd.it/5buckgok5lx61.png What am I to do???

fnord77 5y ago

problem at least on OS X is none of these term replacements render fonts as well as the native term.

miguelmota 5y ago

I’ve tried xterm, terminator, termite, urxvt, st, kitty, and gnome-terminal but Alacritty is my go to because of it’s speed and simplicity. Alacritty has no menus, no tabs, no scroll bars, and configuration is done via a single config file. I pair it with tmux. The only minor thing I wished Alacritty would support is font ligatures.

harryruhr 5y ago

I still use xterm with a bitmap font plus tmux. Low on resources, fast and all features I need.

vnhnhm 5y ago

I hope it "obsoletes" kitty as well https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544#issuecomment-828592113 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544#issuecomment-8...

0xbeefeed 5y ago

I don't know why would anyone use Alacritty. Don't tell me that tabs aren't important, and don't tell me to "use tmux" as a replacement. Plus, Alacritty is slow as fuck compared to every other terminal I've used (I haven't used iTerm2). Its only selling point is "written in Rust" which isn't enough for me.