Switching To The Alacritty Terminal Emulator

Alacritty is a free and open source terminal emulator written in Rust. It is cross-platform and supports GNU/Linux, BSD, MacOS and Windows. It uses GPU acceleration and claims to be the fastest terminal emulator ever. It is also quite customizable. Because of these points, I think I will switch to using Alacritty as my terminal emulator.
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[@TheUndeadLeech]

Thank you for covering Alacritty in a video, we're always happy to get some positive feedback. Just as a small note, running `tree` is not a good way to benchmark, since it's too heavy on file I/O. The best commonly available tool to stresstest terminals is `yes`, though it mainly impacts scrolling speed, not raw throughput. For throughput, which is what vim is more similar too, I'd recommend using our own vtebench tool. Also if anyone is experiencing troubles with Alacritty, feel free to let us know on our tracker. We can't fix what we don't know about.

[@GwenHrothgar]

sadly it doesn't work on my old notebook that only supports OpenGL version 2.1

[@TheUndeadLeech]

@@GwenHrothgar Yeah, currently OpenGL 3.2+ is required. There has been some talk about supporting lower versions, but it's a lot of effort unfortunately and I don't have any hardware for testing.

[@GwenHrothgar]

TheUndeadLeech I don't know Rust, but I've programmed with the OpenGL library in its native C language, translating the 3.x OpenGL tutorials code into 2.1 while I was learning it. So, I'll see if I can fix that for me.

[@robsku1]

Me thinks the test should also use a lot of control sequences - how fast they get parsed and acted upon affects HUMONGOUSLY the speed if you're doing something like running video using aalib or cacalib and to lesser extent with any program that outputs a lot and uses different colours and possibly other things that require using ANSI/VT100+ control sequences.

[@SuperSand2000]

The default colors are wrong and you don't care at all

[@67fabs]

I Switched from Alacritty to Kitty for the following reasons : - Ligatures support, there is an opened ticket for Alacritty but it's not ready yet - Alacritty doesn't allow to read settings from environment variables or importing configuration files while you can do it with Kitty Alacritty may be faster than Kitty but both are already so fast, I can't notice a difference in my usage. But I keep an eye on this project as I love Rust :)

[@DevilDead13820]

Funny thing is that I switched from Kitty to Alacritty. I once had an issue which I was able to find on github. It was closed because the maintainer basically said that it doesn't bother him personally so he doesn't care if it bothers anyone else. This is actually a fine behavior, even if the project is open source, the maintainer doesn't have to comply to every request of everyone. Once alacritty started working for me, I decided to switch to it because it doesn't have any issues (for me). Ligatures support was a bummer at first, but since I don't use any language that makes use of them heavily (like functional languages), I decided that it wasn't important. On top of that, it rendered the output of a lot of things less readable and sometimes even buggy. I would recommend either of them tbh, to me they're already the best terminal emulators on the market by FAR. Pick the one that suits your needs (like in your case, Kitty seemed to be the better choice)

[@johnsci911]

Newb here kitty sometimes doesn't load glyphs in nvim, does anyone knows how to fix it?

[@KookoCraft]

Ligatures and tabs are bloat

[@gioelesinopoli2386]

Hi Dt, I follow you recently, because I recently became a Linux user. I wanted to thank you for all your videos, now thanks to your Gitlab page I have a terminal with beautiful Alacritty. I will continue to follow your videos with passion even if I have to listen to some pieces again (I'm Italian). Thanks!!!

[@kevinl.9657]

6:24 I wouldn't say that it is "picky". It's just how YAML files work.

[@midori7289]

You should try kitty, a great terminal emulator IMHO. Like alacritty, it is gpu accelerated, it has a loooot of features ( including image viewing without w3m), and it has a great support for font ligature sw(dot)kovidgoyal(dot)net(slash)kitty

[@evgenyyastremsky6818]

Yeah, I love rust ecosystem and alacritty in particular, but switched to kitty too, as it is much more complete and featureful gpu-accelerated terminal emulator, alacritty is still WIP.

[@Joinemm]

yeah I changed from alacritty to kitty just for font ligatures. It's not quite as fast but that's a tradeoff im willing to take

[@migue7490]

I tried some terminal emulators after watching this vid and I found Kitty, it's also use GPU and it works better for me with ranger, I would give it a try. Great vid.

[@alexstone691]

Used kitty and its awesome

[@rizkyadiyanto7922]

can you explain whats the different?

[@Iggy_Lakic]

@@rizkyadiyanto7922 Kitty also have tabs (which this emulator doesn't)

[@dagadbm]

@@rizkyadiyanto7922 kitty actually works lol... alacritty doesnt work well AT ALL I don't get why he is giving support to this . kitty is way more robust

[@nihal4602]

Kitty is actually awesome.

[@technologicalwaste7612]

rg is only faster than grep -r. It is not a replacement for grep in a straight line (single file). Also, the times of 0.004s and 0.005s are standard 'zero' times for these programs. Exceptionally tiny C programs tend to start at times between 0.001s-0.003s, but grep starts at about 0.004s. Try it in the terminal a few times, and you will see what I mean. This is important for anyone writing shell scripts that is mindful of time efficiency, since the execution of any C binary will add at least 1-3 ms to the execution time, each time it is invoked. This can rapidly accumulate seconds in nested loops.

[@Xeab]

Glad to see you talk about alacrity. I love it it’s perfect for what I need, better than kitty in my opinion although very similar love it, but it does have slightly higher input lag compared to st for example

[@coder4937]

Yeah I ran tree on St and compared with alacritty and what The St was almost 2 second faster without GPU acceleration!

[@SimGunther]

What a great time to be alive for this terminal emulator arms race. When will the Jai dev stack ever come? 🤣

[@Anon-tj7qb]

After watching this video I installed Alacritty on my Gentoo laptop. I was using lxterminal before and I find this terminal to be a great change. It may not be a minimal install, however, it really is fast at what it does. I'll probably stick with this terminal emulator for awhile now. Thank you for mentioning it, best!

[@esra_erimez]

I misread the title and thought it said "atrocity"

[@MrDaylight]

I exclusively use yakuake purely because I can pull it down like a game menu from one keystroke. Insanely useful.

[@Aldrenean]

I did the same for a while but too often I would accidentally leave a sudoed session running without realizing or something. Most tiling WMs have terminal bound to mod+enter which is nearly as fast, and you could even bind it to an F key if you really want single-button operation. :)

[@duminicad]

in terminal CTRL-U clears the current command that you're typing CTRL-L clears the entire screen, just like typing "clear" and hitting enter

[@annahri]

Ctrl+Y to restore entire line you've previously cleared using Ctrl+U

[@qbpie]

I used to use Alacritty, but I switched to Kitty over the past year and have been quite happy. I feel like the speed has been indiscernibly similar.

[@yagodematos]

Alacritty is overrated because is written in Rust...

[@braelinmichelus]

I've been using the Sakura terminal emulator. It's a pretty nice minimal terminal, the best I've found so far. I like that it uses keyboard shortcuts for tabbing and splitting, rather than relying on a clunky menu bar like other TEs.

[@chourdakisgeorge8419]

DT i’ve been using it since version 0.1.1 and its by far the fastest terminal i have ever used.. I m sure you will keep it.GPU rendering ftw!

[@DistroTube]

Been using it for a couple of days. Haven't noticed any major issues....yet.

[@PenguinRevolution]

When you said that Alacritty was GPU accelerated I was wondering why it needed to be GPU accelerated. But now I'm going to have to go and build it on my system and give it a try.

[@robsku1]

Same here, but I guess there might actually be a benefit from it even in such simple 2D stuff as writing characters on terminal... I'd like to know if that xterm was set to use TrueType fonts though - I'd be willing to bet that TrueType fonts have a big difference with xterm speed compared to older simpler font types. I would like to properly test this terminal against xterm with non-truetype fonts.

[@superscatboy]

@@robsku1 It could be that each glyph is pre-rendered into textures in graphics memory, then each character is rendered as a quad with an absurdly simple and efficient fragment shader (that's how I'd approach a task like this at least). If that's the case, then the type of font shouldn't make any difference, except for taking a tiny fraction of a second longer to re-render the font if and when the size changes (because the user zoomed in or out or whatever).

[@jasewaaang]

Really wanted to like Alacritty for its purported performance and minimalism but 1. Input latency was unbearable 2. Rendering often flickers when scrolling in Vim Settled on Kitty, which performs just as well (also GPU for rendering) and feels like a much more mature project.

[@maxvilleneuve7531]

Been using Alacritty as my default terminal since I've switched to Arch (about 2 months) and absolutely love it

[@Sphrem]

Arch and Alacritty all the way, baby!

[@RobBoudreau]

Where ripgrep shines is when you have a large directory of source or text files and you're looking for a word or phrase. Where grep can take many seconds (sometimes much more in large projects) ripgrep results are nearly instantaneous. Works great in vim and emacs too.

[@loarto]

The reason why rg works good for me is because of what it automatically ignores.

[@Codeaholic1]

Using tree / for your benchmark is probably a bad idea. Tree will hit the file system, but because of the kernel's file system cache these operations will perform faster on subsequent executions. The alacritty people have a terminal benchmarking framework that you can use. Although just outputting tree / to a file and cating the file will probably give you a more reasonable comparison. Also using a high speed camera pointed at the screen will give you an idea of speed, latency and jank/stuttering. It's also important to know that some terminal emulators cheat. If there's a lot of output to the screen and it can't keep up, it will skip lines of text and just not write them to the screen.

[@mariolis]

It is my terminal emulator that I use daily ,and its great !!! So fast and so instant... With thousads , if not millions of times more powerful hardware than computers of the 80's , every terminal emulator should feel instant ... but they dont , and I don't understand why... but Alacritty is the only terminal emulator I've tried that actually feels like that (Edit: I know that the difference is GPU acceleration, but even without it , CPUs of today being hundreds of thousands of times faster than in the 80s, every terminal emulator should still feel 100% instant even wirhout GPU acceleration)

[@olexp9017]

My Gentoo says "No!" due to 300 MB of dependencies.

[@eku333]

My gentoo simply segfaults whenever I try to run Alacritty

[@ltxr9973]

Can't count how many times I've gotten angry because of the rust toolchain on Gentoo. Like when they changed the naming scheme of all the libraries just when I hadn't updated in months.

[@pierrepracht]

@@swirlingabyss You say that because you are adamant to the monad laws ? Or you don't know what you're talking about ? ;-)

[@froge8121]

swirlingabyss wow you really seem to hate a programming language where you probably habe never written code in and don’t even know about the benefits of rust: - it is fast - if there’s something wrong with your program, there are helpful error messages - your code is free from segfaults and other memory errors

[@pierreperegrindemaricourt8379]

No one: Absolutely no one: Distrotube: "I am certainly not distrohopping".

[@AnzanHoshinRoshi]

Thank you, Derek. I had never heard of alacritty until now. I'll give it a shot.

[@user-ky8ns7fg7c]

I like your videos, this days i have been looking into upgrade my terminal skills, your video give me a lot of support!

[@friedrichdergroe9664]

Totally cool. Just compiled Alarcritty, and will have to play with it a bit. Currently, I'm using Terminology, but it has a few issues. Seems like Alarcritty may crush it! We'll see. Thanks.

[@Chalisque]

No tabs. So I can't replicated my workflow from Konsole and Windows Terminal. (Where e.g. one tab is an ssh into another machine on my network, e.g. my pi, and in that ssh running a tmux -- having a tmux within a tmux is problematic, so basically I have tabs in my terminal, then tmux's within tabs, and possibly tabs within vim/nvim within the tmux.) Then something I like with Windows Terminal is that I can have multiple tab profiles each with their own settings, such as background image (I use a darkened wallpaper for each profile, so can easily tell which I'm using by the wallpaper.) Using the GPU or not doesn't bother me. Not having tabs does. And apparently the lack of tabs is by design.

[@chopcooey]

i use alacritty, it's alright but the things that bother me are: -there doesn't seem to be a vim-like visual mode, although that can be done through tmux if you use that -the configuration files don't allow includes of other files, which is a pain, for example, i you want a separate color and font file

[@no_fb]

You can always contribute to the project (1st referenced link), though from the list of pull requests and how long they've been waiting, it could take a while before being accepted. It seems a pretty active project but they're still far from stable so it's interesting but too early to use that as a terminal in production.

[@TheUndeadLeech]

A vim-like mode is definitely high on our TODO list, though of course it's a big feature so it'll probably still take a bit of time. I'm surprised the configuration file includes are so high on your list, because while it has been mentioned before, it's far less common than the vim-mode complaint. So thanks for the feedback.

[@death-disco]

if you use nixos with home manager the last point isn’t really an issue

[@chopcooey]

@@TheUndeadLeech it's so high on my list because that's the whole list

[@sentinel9651]

A vim-like mode outside of vim for a terminal? What's that?

[@thingsiplay]

Normal people: Let's vote and see which tool gets most votes, so I can see what content people want or what I can try next. DistroTube: Alacritty gets 0 votes as the only terminal emulator. Interesting, let me try it out and make a content about it, because you seem to be interested in. In all seriousness I appreciate this video. Other KZbinrs do popular stuff only and that is something I can get everywhere. Trying out unpopular choices and giving feedback and document it is very valuable in my opinion.

[@user-mr3mf8lo7y]

Terminator is the best one by far. With its tab, divisions and color options, been quite satisfactory for past 10+ years.

[@trueriver1950]

No surprise: the command you timed produces lots of screen output: exactly what is accelerated by using the GPU. It proves the point, but also demonstrates that the noticeable differences will only occur with output intensive work.

[@iNemoden]

Atm I’m finding kitty to be just better on macos at least for my setup: tmux, vim. It’s negligibly slower compared to alacritty, but 1. Has support for ligatures (might be one of the reasons it’s a little slower) 2. Has support for “nerd” glyphs right out of the box so I can use regular fonts, i.e. just Monoid, FiraCode, IBM Plex, M+, Iosevka etc, not their nerd-patched versions

[@krozareq]

I don't recommend using time's 'user' output for any benchmarking of that sort. On multi-core and SMT-enabled CPUs, which are most all of them these days, it's going to be the cumulative time along any threads used. For example if you compile code for one minute and enable all 16 threads of a Ryzen X3700 for the make, then your user time will be somewhere around 16 minutes. Higher numbers in 'user' can be a good thing.

[@VtDmhD]

There is a bug either in alacritty or in tmux, that makes tmux ignore history size and limit it to the default setting of ~2000 lines

[@zmdeadelius]

Will be switching my old netbook to NetBSD and Alacritty seems to be an appropriate addition, considering the slow CPU on this thing. Thanks to Alacritty devs for the term and DT for the review. Looking forward to testing it out.

[@erics7004]

I use Cool Retro Term, it's just amazing.

[@arianh]

I'm using Alacritty from now! Thanks for the video.

[@barlog_m]

Only kitty supports ligatures and GPU rendering at the same time. There is no other choice.

[@walek92SFC]

How does it fare with latency though? I remember back in the day LWN or someone tested a few terminal emulators for input latency and alacritty wasn't really impressive. I considered using it but i didn't wanna install rust on that machine cause i have no need for it, and as far as my usage i didn't care about the throughput, with the render latency not being better i stuck with xterm actually.

[@luke_filewalker]

I dig how the changes in the config apply on save!

[@BogdanTheGeek]

YOU CAN USE A MOUSE IN VIM, this changed my life man, ive always hated the window split resizing in vim.

[@tealc6218]

As a debian healer how much alacritty should i use?....I use vim with vigor for health regeneration, but when I'm casting the timing tree global cooldown takes too long. Also any hints on systemd damage mitigation would be helpful

[@ThePsykalist]

great video. my only comment would be the terminal is a bit small.. go big.. great work..I have watched lots of your videos.. the information rate is great..

[@elianiva]

Alacritty sometimes stuck on me when running a command that needs to wait like installing a package from repo, cloning from github, running tree command. So I stick to ST.

[@Oswee]

I found that Vim fonts looks much more crisp in Alacritty and resizing also looks more granular. Like it. Enabled as daily driver. Will see how it goes. Tnx for sharing this.

[@iNemoden]

Dzintars Klavins when you say “more ”... what does that apply for? Like more than what exactly ?

[@peacemekka]

I use xterm. Feels like an og terminal. Also how customizing it is weird af. And it feels like a total barebones terminal because of its similarity to the tty. (middle mouse to paste lol and its the only terminal can beep to my motherboard speakers other than tty itself) I'm not leaving the papa of terminals for some gpu accelerated side hoe. TL;DR Use what you love.

I love Rust and will consider using anything built with it to support the language adoption but I've never considered my terminal to be too slow and in need of a speed boost. Other functionality than speed is more important imo. Although, a good walk-through and informative video. Thanks.

[@copper4eva]

I think I'll try this out. st is cool and all, but as you said, patching is annoying. I'm a fairly new Linux user, and I'd honestly just rather have a nice simple config file. I wish you had done the speed difference test with st, cause I think that's faster than xterm anyways. Honestly, that's the main reason why I stuck with st over other terminal emulators, cause it just felt so snappy, which is how a freaking terminal emulator should be. If there's one thing that shouldn't be bloated, it's this. But even if alacritty isn't quite as fast as st, I'll probably go with it anyways.

[@testfdasfdsafds]

It’s trade-off you can’t have all features and simplicity. You choose. St keep it simple but how generous it be when it also provide some patches. You can also contribute ones.

[@copper4eva]

@@testfdasfdsafds There's only two patches I care about, transparency and scrolling. And I can live without both of them. I'm not switching from st to alacritty purely because of patching. But, if I can choose between patching, or a config file. I honestly prefer the config file. And I don't believe the config file slows the whole process down in any considerable matter.

[@testfdasfdsafds]

@@copper4eva Yes, config files slows process but who care when we have power machine, but in the sense of optimization it does matter.

[@14u2ponder]

This was my default terminal emulator when I was using void. After moving to openbsd I got rid of it and went back to xterm which is a lot faster at least on openbsd.

[@amosnimos]

Me: no gpu Alacrity: exited the chat.

[@CostaKazistov]

Audio is out of sync with video - about 0.5 second. Anyone else having this issue?

[@jinxterx]

Every single video of his is out of sync with the audio I think

[@0sergey1]

YES. It was bothering me enough that I streamed it in mpv w/ youtube-dl and adjusted the audio delay +250 ms, which seemed about right. Big improvement. -This is not really hard but I forgot the keys I had adjusting delay set to so I was trying to roll with it at first till I got fed up and checked my config file. I suggest you get familiar with this process, so in case it ever bothers you a fix is just a few keys away, though you will need to spend a little time adjusting the sync. -Note: I think the default adjustment is in intervals of 100 ms, and I changed it a while back to 50 ms for more precision. 100 is not precise enough, IMO.

[@hedicha]

Hey, at 6:47 you do a $ ls (l) and you have beautiful colors on everything how did you do this? i have mine setup with my colors but they only work on the files, i would like mine to have more colors like yours at the timestamp, (for example the perms) any pointers?

[@matthewrossee]

Hi man, I know it's been 10 month and you probably have found the solution, but someone else may take advantage of it. sudo pacman -S exa Now go to your ~/.bashrc, and paste it: alias ls='exa -al --color=always --group-directories-first' # my preferred listing alias la='exa -a --color=always --group-directories-first' # all files and dirs alias ll='exa -l --color=always --group-directories-first' # long format alias lt='exa -aT --color=always --group-directories-first' # tree listing alias l.='exa -a | egrep "^\."' I found it in DT's dotfiles.

[@gz6616]

My `time tree /` tests suggested that: alacritty: 57 sec, gnome-terminal: 18 sec. Does it have something to do with which one is run first? I tested alacritty before genome-terminal.

[@DistroTube]

Might have affected things. A more scientific test would be run tree multiple times and take an average. But I didn't do this either. ;)

[@iyervenki]

you are right. once you run tree the next re-runs leverage some sort of cache and it is way better in subsequent re-runs.

[@gz6616]

I re-tested alacritty and gnome-terminal, now each is run 20 times (not including the 1st run). Results: alacritty: 24.662 +/- 1.319 sec gnome-terminal: 18.218 +/- 0.172 sec. It is indeed faster, and also more consistent in speed.

[@robsku1]

@@gz6616 I'm interested in how this would turn out, but I think you should run the tree command once before timing them 20 times - could be there's no significant difference, but I would be interested to hear the results anyway :)

[@maxv3286]

I'm maybe a little to sensitive but alacritty has always a tiny tiny delay when i open it up so i'm gona stay wit urxvt for now :)

[@36424567254]

i have a very weird problem/bug with urxvt, which I couldn't find mentioned anywhere: if i scroll up _with the mousewheel_ , urxvt keeps scrolling back and PAST the start of the current buffer, e.g. it goes outside of currently open `less`, which is super confusing.

[@robsku1]

@@36424567254 I've experienced that in the past with other terminal emulators - not sure which, but unless 'less' is compiled to support (I don't even know if it has an option for it) mouse then that's normal behaviour. Does the scroll wheel work for scrolling *inside* 'less' in other terminals? I'm just taking a guess, but it might have something to do with some terminal feature that xterm and most other terminals do support, but rxvt for some reason doesn't... I'm just guessing here, but have you tried asking help from tech discussion forums and other such places?

[@robsku1]

@@36424567254 Also, I'm not sure, but there might be a configuration option for mouse in less... As I said, I don't know, or remember, but you can check the man page...

[@dreastonbikrain1896]

Alacritty has vim-keybindings, at the moment in 0.5.0-dev IDK whether anybody spotted, but alacritty is getting modal control support, just built the 0.5.0-dev version, I am rocking vim-based selection in my terminal just like in termite, also opening links. After installing rustup and cargo(rust website: www.rust-lang.org/learn/get-started) use: $ cargo install --git github.com/alacritty/alacritty to install the latest master. At this point you should probably uninstall other instances of alacritty and symlink(or whatever) to ~/.config/cargo/bin/alacritty The config file then you find: github.com/alacritty/alacritty/blob/master/alacritty.yml You are interested in the Vi mode section. Works out of the box pretty much. ps.: if you are using zsh, and trapalarm, then you are out of luck, that hook fucks-up the selection, but I just realized that using that hook 90% of the time is stupid, there are specific hooks for almost every case. links (just in case somebody thinks I am a magician and pulled the info out of my ass): github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/737 github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1151 github.com/alacritty/alacritty/commit/1a8cd172e520e493bacc9c6a2ae6f80de086eaa3 github.com/alacritty/alacritty/pull/3315/commits github.com/alacritty/alacritty/blob/master/INSTALL.md#debianubuntu-1 github.com/alacritty/alacritty/blob/master/alacritty.yml github.com/alacritty/alacritty/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

[@partypat2151]

Alacritty is designed for tiling window managers. For anyone who don't use tiling window manager, try kitty (Not Kitty).

[@the_real_vdegenne]

I really love this terminal emu. When I am using dual_kawase blur with picom on my i3desktop terminals like termite or gnome-terminal are messing with rendering. Because alacritty is using gpu resources it seems to fit well with these types of effects. One another thing that I like is that the default configuration is almost sufficient, on some new systems I just install alacritty and I don't need to create a config file, I just zoom in using the keybinding ctrl+= and I'm good to go. I'd recommend this emulator to any new comers.

[@minepro1206]

I've been waiting for this. I'll be needing a terminal emulator for my new Arch installation and I want a non-mainstream one.

[@DistroTube]

^^ Wants a meme terminal to go with his meme distro. This guy gets it! :D

[@minepro1206]

@Renzo Morini No no!

[@minepro1206]

@Renzo Morini I've got other things in mind (firefox).

[@minepro1206]

Edit : I'm back to Debian, tty only.

[@iNemoden]

Well it is kinda mainstream now

[@MattCamp]

I just installed it last night.. and I am digging it so far!

[@OliNorwell]

PSA: The tree test must be affected by other factors, probably caching in the file system Here is what I got for time tree / alacritty: 6.85 seconds st: 3.28 seconds ......... however!.......... I then redid it with alacritty, and it took 3.23 seconds then st again... 3.28 seconds So alacritty beats st by 0.05 in my test, but the difference is basically non-existent, and you need to run it a second or third time.

[@DistroTube]

Truthfully, a "real" test should be done multiple times and an average taken. But I'm too lazy for that. ;)

[@jackt6112]

NOTE: For Windows users, it requires Windows 10 I found out as I use Windows 8.1 at the moment.

[@CairosNaobum]

That was nice. Thank you.

[@Brendanasdfdsf]

Keep the videos coming :)

[@CobaltSpace]

There is one thing I don’t like about alacritty: In vim, there are different plugins that can cause different kinds of underlines. And easy example is if you have spell set. In alacritty, all underlines are just a normal underline.

[@GuillermoJoandet]

The bad: In old boxes, and most important, in many virtual machines, GL 3.30 is not supported so I had to bind an alias or function to start it with variable LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 alacritty The good: Very good for putty replacement in windows (also as win powershell window)

[@andrewpalm2103]

I installed it while watching. Seems snappy! Additional: I experimented with it for a couple of hours. Fast. Added custom Tango colors using terminal.sexy. Text seems a bit dim compared to other terminals (but that may be adjustable). Picture preview with vifm did not work, even with an added time delay in calling w3m-image. This is kind of a deal killer for me unless someone has a hack that fixes this.

[@tomasz-waszczyk]

Thanks for the video, could you say what theme of desktop do you use?

[@kahlancypher]

During the speed comparison why does Alacritty find fewer directories and total files?

[@tripcodeQ7]

What is the compatibility with w3m image viewer. (urxvt doesn't due it well), but it has it's own image preview functions? Also curious about ST and w3m image viewer.

[@DistroTube]

I don't use w3m. I use lynx. I prefer not having images in my text-based browser. Images are bloat. ;)

[@indigo0086]

Ripgrep is great but to include perl like regexp with back references you’d need to custom build it with that included, but hey when was the last time I wrote a back ref regexp. I use rg with emacs for navigation and project wise search and it’s awesomely fast

[@batboy49]

Alacrity is ok I played with it and abandoned because of the vim issue you showed how to fix....will try again In other words u taught me something thanks!

[@rm-rf4612]

Despite its overengineering, alacritty is not that fast. xterm has less input latency and urxvt and st both have greater scrolling speed. See lwn.net/Articles/751763/ Not to mention its resource usage is much higher than other terminals.

[@rayyanshaikh5591]

He literally did a test against xterm... maybe watch the whole video??

[@dmitrii_cl]

​@@rayyanshaikh5591 do you know difference between input lag and throughput?

[@CrustyAbsconder]

Has anybody out there used the dictionary "sdcv," from terminal ?

[@FakeLame]

I love it it just feels and looks great and config is super easy

[@copper4eva]

Have you uploaded your config file for alacritty yet? Cause I can't find it yet, but you just did recently install it, so that's fair. Also, have you heard of the uzbl web browser? I came across it literally today, and seems pretty sweet. It appears to be very Unix like, you can have it just render text like the i3w, and it can also render a website with all the bloated javascript and junk to make a webpage appear just like it would in a modern browser. It seems very little used, and I'm not sure why. Looks awesome to me, but again, only just found out about it.

[@DistroTube]

Will push it now : gitlab.com/dwt1/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml

[@leenukes7418]

Damn it's really fast,just installed it,i was shocked how fast it is :-)

[@EscepticoHumanistaUU]

I have to say that Alacritty has impressed me as much as it has impressed you. There is only one problem, though. I am far more productive in GNOME using Wayland, because it runs very, VERY fast and smoothly in my computer. Other X based desktops, including GNOME for X, do not run as fast, and my system drags a lot. Unfortunately, Alacritty does not work well with Wayland. This means that, for purposes of what I do, it is next to useless, I have no idea how to solve this problem. I wish there was a way the Alacritty developers make this available for Wayland. For now, I will use other terminal emulators (I use GNOME Terminal) as my default. It may not be the best, but it is enough for what I need to do.

[@pyrokamileon]

before I started using Alacritty on my arch Linux install, I used to always hit f11 on the pre-installed terminal that comes with either Debian or Ubuntu for instance and I would get not just a maximized window but a full screen terminal. I have watched different videos and I have tried finding it online but as far as I can tell Alacritty does not have a full screen option. do you know if there is a full screen option for alacritty that maybe I just missed?

[@kylerjohnson988]

I installed Alacritty and I liked it until one day pressing the backspace key began typing random characters and spaces instead of removing them. It didn’t happen anywhere else on my system or in any other terminal emulator I had installed. I even uninstalled and reinstalled it and it worked for a few days and then started doing it again.

[@walid7885]

Did you try eshell in emacs?

[@robsku1]

Wasn't that just a shell running in emas buffer? There's a full VT100+ compatible terminal mode for emacs ;) Haven't used that for a while, don't remember the command and what, if any, extra was possibly needed to install it.

[@walid7885]

@@robsku1 just M-x Eshell, you can use bash, zsh and even elisp. Way too powerfull for a regular shell.

[@robsku1]

@@walid7885 The command I was looking for was 'term' - try it inside emacs, it's a xterm-like terminal, inside emacs. Eshell is nice, and I don't know everything that can be done within it, but it's not a VT100 compatible terminal. 'term' command gives you that and you can run all the programs mentioned in this video inside it, while programs like less, screen/tmux or aafire and bb will not run correctly with eshell, as it will not understand the terminal control sequences that these applications use to move around, change the output colours, etc... Just thought you might find it interesting... Could be that 'term' can actually provide you all the power of 'eshell', but with VT100+ compatible terminal emulator - not sure. It is a "little" slow on updating though, for example 'tree' command of my home directory would likely take multiple times as long as with other terminal emulators and programs like aafire/cacafire update much more slowly, which I actually prefer with them - but with older hardware it's unusable for this kind of text-mode graphics demos...

[@walid7885]

@@robsku1 Isn't that the point of using emacs? Tmux is nice but emacs embedded solution offers that too. You can have workspaces with panes. Running tmux inside emacs is just a waste of good resources. Even if you are working on a remote host you can use tramp with dired. My daily driver is a Thinkpad X60T 32 bit processor 1.6ghz 3gig of RAM (16 years old). Very fast with no issues at all. My window manager is EXWM.

[@DarkGladiator]

I must try this, thank you (even though I dont think you will see this since its 2yr old vid)

[@matthewrease2376]

Tried ripgrep but it doesn't have recursive (-R) like grep! I recursively grep all the time to search files for various strings, it's a feature I just can't live without.

I love Rust, it's my main and almost only Language I use now (bye Python, bye Bash, bye C++...). I tried Alacritty, built from source. I launched it from Gnome Terminal. Much worse colors and fonts, and zero ways to configure even the minimal thing. I'm not going to spend hours with the config file just to make it look good. I know it's alpha, but still. GTerm looks amazing-from-the-start. Let's just say it like it is: GTerm is the best. The only thing missing is tab grouping.

[@modokimokona]

Awesome video! Could you please add some demos on how to use alacritty with tabbed? Many thanks!!!

[@justsomeguy8385]

I'd love to see a list of the fastest utilities for every category. Or maybe even a distro with the fastest of everything installed by default(which probably already exists but I haven't looked).

[@drishalballaney6590]

clear linux maybe..?

[@mosth8ed]

I have been using Alacritty for about a year or so. It is pretty great. It doesn't have the most fancy features or frills, but it doesn't need them.

[@ColinMcAlister-kilt]

So I managed to get alacritty installed. I had to jump through lots of hoops (Deb/Ubuntu libraries and then adding a $PATH in the .bashrc. But I got it working. My question is how to run it directly. At the moment I have to pull up a Terminal (OS Mint 20) using it's little Terminal icon and from there type alacritty to run it. It seems dumb to pull up a terminal to pull up another terminal. Is that how it's done usually or am I missing something? Help would be appreciated.

[@joaofnds]

alacritty, fd, rg, fzf, dust, lf, tmux, vim/emacs, z (and probably some other things I can't remember now), that's my stack!

[@joaofnds]

@John Smith github.com/bootandy/dust "A more intuitive version of du in rust"

[@hesslein007]

DT, I asked Chris Titus and "Switched to Linux" guy the very same question, I got a response from the other guy saying he's not familiar with Ada programming language and he'll try to find out from the forums, but I didn't get a response yet from Titus: were do I find a gfortran compiler/linker and a gnat-gps Ada Development Suite which has a GUI that is the gps ? I've searched all over the internet. AUR (I'm using Arch)has a gnat-gps in their repo but right before the installation is completed after compiling the source (it's done automatically) there comes a message in the terminal that says one or more packages had bad signatures and it list the gprbuild as being the culprit. Do you have any idea where else can I find the gfortran, g++ and Ada gnat-gps tools ? I have gcc on my system but it doesn't include the g++, gnat and gfortran tools. I went to Ada's website and downloaded the 64bit version of Ada 2019 for Linux and made the package executable and it installed in home/mike/opt/GNAT/2019/bin, but it isn't working. I click on the gps in the bin which should launch the IDE and all I get is the script in the text editor and it isn't putting an icon on the desktop unlike an earlier version that I downloaded from AUR and it installed perfectly but back then I was using arch in VirtualBox and this gnat-gps straight from AUR installed perfectly adding an icon and everything - the same version gps - and now that I installed Arch on the physical drive I can't download it any longer because one signature key wasn't good or something to this effect. Any advice on how I can install this damned thing on my Arch with KDE Plasma DE? I would deeply appreciate it. Also, I tried to launch the gps GUI from the shell, same thing, it doesn't work. I followed the instructions to the letter. Maybe I should install the GNAT 2019 in home/mike/usr/bin? I tried to modify the environment variable by adding the PATH in the shell. Nothing works.Thanks. I love your videos btw

[@DistroTube]

No clue about any of this. Your best bet to get support questions answered is asking on the Arch forums or asking the Ada devs. Asking random KZbinrs (me, Chris, Tom, etc) is rarely going to get you an answer unless, by some miracle, we happen to know about the topic at hand. Linux is much, much, much bigger than any one person. So ask in the proper channels and you will be far more likely to run across someone who knows what you are talking about.

[@hesslein007]

@@DistroTube You're right. Thanks DT.

[@PaulMason99]

Downloaded it, had a play. It's fast but having to edit a text config file just to change something simple like font size? Especially when the config file format is so fussy about indents. The limiting factor with terminal use is my thinking and typing speed, not the terminal itself. Yes in the artificial setting of something like "tree" from root it saves some time, but IRL I'd be outputting that to a file first anyway. I watched the video Rust Meetup video where the author talks about the rationale behind it. What I got from that was a) he was using mac and that had some issues caused by the OS, and b) he felt that offloading some of the work to the GPU frees up the CPU to do real work. Well I don't use a mac but the second argument applies. However unless you're trying to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of a PC, I can't see why I would sacrifice usability for speed.

[@leberkassemmel]

I dislike that I can’t enter any of €, or | on my German keyboard and the only way I know to fix it is to change my keyboard layout to US. There’s a lot of occasions where I just use the default macOS Terminal again because of that weird bug

[@maxdevjs3457]

Could you try with kitty in your system? In my less scientific tests, Alacritty is indeed faster. But difference is around 12%.

[@gimcrack555]

After your no longer wet behind the ears after using Linux. Then yes, you should think about other ways to speed your process while using Linux. Fiddle around with other applications, your config files and learning other Linux tools. That have a helping hand of making your progress using Linux much faster. Nice presentation video here, good job.

[@rubenoglia]

I've tried Alacritty on Gnome (on Wayland), but copying and pasting to and from Alacritty using the mouse doesn't work - probably it requires configuration but I haven't figured it out yet. I usually copy and paste from browser to terminal or vice versa. That works well with gnome-terminal.

[@ajmasia]

Hello, first of all, thanks for the channel. Your videos are fantastic. I have detected a problem with Alacritty. When a spinner appears in any CLI, it blinks throughout its execution. How can this be fixed? Thanks!

[@willadams6217]

Thanks just switched to Alacritty. I couldn't use relative line numbering in neovim in xfce4 terminal as it just slowed it down so much. Alacritty has no such issues.

[@AliensInc.]

Just tried this and I only get errors on every setting I do :( First is the font, I got Mononoki Nerd Font installed but noooo, still error on line 105 column 5 which is 'font:' thus that colon :( If I remark that I get the same error on next section, line 179, column 7 which is: 'colors:' thus that colon again. If I try to set scrolling, I get an error there.... ARGH!!

[@NekoiNemo]

That's neat, but 6:30 clearly shows why it shouldn't be used. Whose bright idea was it to use literally the worst data format (YAML) for the config? Here's hoping that alacrity-json/-toml fork will exist soon