Alacritty
Alacritty is a cross-platform, OpenGL, and GPU-accelerated terminal emulator built in Rust programming language. Personally, although there are others shown to be faster in benchmarks, this has to be the fastest one that I messed around with, with a good range of customization that may offer a — ChefKiss — fine experience.
One of my main frustrations with terminal emulators had to be with input and rendering
latency inconsistency. I mean, having a tool that may promote a faster experience
is good, but it won’t matter if my workflow is not in a consistent pace. If I can’t rely
on a tool that cannot maintain a certain consistent pace, I rather use a slower one. Luckily,
Alacritty — since 2022 — has proven to be a reliable tool, though it MAY suffer when
integrating with other terminal tools such as tmux. Still good in my book, I can
deal with configuration and integration down the line.
Installation
Follow this link, but just a quick tip:
There are two ways to install Alacritty…
- You may use a package manager of your choice in your OS. This maintains consistency if you wish to rely on regular (or not) stable upgrades from it.
- Or download a binary or source code so you can build it on your own from the repository’s release page.
I really wished that more programs could do autoupgrades — under the discretion of the user if chosen to do so — rather than we rely on package management/download a new binary from the release page. Either way, you do you.
Configuration
I have my configuration file available through here. Let me go over some of the most relevant stuff that needs explanation due to my personal preferences.
[env]
TERM = "xterm-256color"
This is the terminal reference that I’ll be using, which uses a 256-bit colour palette. In other words, it may render more colours, which then can make terminals look prettier — or not.
[scrolling]
history = 100000
multiplier = 3
I don’t like keeping a small command history. Sometimes the output may be too big but still I can filter it out using the built-in search for relevant terms.
[terminal.shell]
args = ["--login"]
program = "/bin/zsh"
If you have multiple shells in your OS, it may default to the one that you don’t really like. So enforce the right one!
[window.padding]
x = 10
y = 10
If you have something like an i3 or aerospace window manager and you’d like to keep windows with that A E S T H E T I C feel.
And the remainder is all a matter of taste, mostly aesthetics and colour scheme, which is using the Gruvbox Material Medium Dark. Enjoy!