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Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

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Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#101

Post by tatterdemalion »

dragonne wrote: post #92
brandur wrote: post #80

I just want to say that this project is amazing. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I think Rust is the most exciting thing that's happening in computing today. This sort of project that plausibly replaces software traditionally written only in C/C++ with something that has performance parity, but is in a language where contributions are relatively accessible and safe, is the most exciting thing even within the boun…

Another Rust terminal emulator project, notty[1], aims to do this. Downthread the author mentions that the projects are looking at collaborating. [1]: https://github.com/withoutboats/notty

notty author here. notty is basically way down a yakstack for me - I wanted better CLI/TUI tools, so I wanted to write a framework for writing CLI/TUI tools, but some of the features I wanted aren't supported by terminals, so I started writing a new terminal. But I don't know anything about graphics programming & this is really far away from what I actually wanted to be doing - so when jwilm showed me alacritty & mentioned implementing notty with it I was pretty stoked.

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#102

Post by wang_li »

brandur wrote: post #80

I just want to say that this project is amazing. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I think Rust is the most exciting thing that's happening in computing today. This sort of project that plausibly replaces software traditionally written only in C/C++ with something that has performance parity, but is in a language where contributions are relatively accessible and safe, is the most exciting thing even within the boun…

You do seem overly excited. :)

Your last paragraph suggests what you really want is a notebook style interface (in the style of mathematica) rather than a terminal.

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#103

Post by eridius »

zie wrote: post #79
eridius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why do you love iTerm? It's always struck me as kind of ugly (especially its preferences). And AFAIK, the only real feature it has that Terminal.app doesn't (besides the native tmux integration, because I still don't really see the point) is support for apps customizing the 256-color palette on the fly (e.g. the initc capability), and wile I really would like to see Terminal.app gain support for tha…

iTerm has https://github.com/ravenac95/sudolikeaboss . Integration of your 1Password passwords with your terminal, which makes life amazing. Typing and copy/pasting passwords(not to mention copy/paste is not exactly secure) is a major time-suck. I'd love generic support for this feature in something like Alacritty.

Interesting, but I don't think I've ever felt the pain of not having that. It's pretty damn easy for me to use the global 1Password hotkey to bring up 1Password Mini, type a few characters to identify the login I want, hit → to expand the login, ↓ to select the password, and ↩ to then copy that password, which I can now paste into the terminal. It's not that hard.

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#104

Post by eridius »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #91
eridius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why do you love iTerm? It's always struck me as kind of ugly (especially its preferences). And AFAIK, the only real feature it has that Terminal.app doesn't (besides the native tmux integration, because I still don't really see the point) is support for apps customizing the 256-color palette on the fly (e.g. the initc capability), and wile I really would like to see Terminal.app gain support for tha…

The coolest feature of recent versions of iTerm is the "Selection respects soft boundaries" feature: with it on, iTerm will detect vim/tmux splits and constrain the selection to just one side of that split. For my workflow, at least, it makes a huge difference. Also, if you start tmux as "tmux -CC" iTerm will open the tmux session in a new window, with GUI tabs for tmux tabs and GUI splits for tmux splits.

That selection thing sounds kind of interesting, though tbh I almost never use vertical splits in the Terminal. The only place I do is in MacVim.

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#105

Post by SloopJon »

malensek wrote: post #78

Awesome! This is exactly what I've been hoping for. The state of terminal emulators on macOS is particularly bad, at least when it comes to speed. Both the built-in term and iTerm have a lot of features, but really start to lag on big screens with a lot of text. I used to run urvxt under XQuartz for this reason, but there's scaling problems with retina screens these days. Nice work. Hopefully this can fill a particul…

I can't remember the last time I thought that my terminal was too slow, except maybe when I tried that Electron-based program a while back (Hyper, I think it was). My priorities are more like the following:

1. Stability. I crashed Alacritty thirty seconds after opening it; possibly related to issue #12.

2. Emulation correctness. In Terminal.app, the cursor often gets out of sync when I "turn the corner" (i.e., backspace across a line boundary).

3. Font rendering. Text in some terminals just looks ugly.

4. Features. Alacritty doesn't seem to show the number of rows and columns when I resize. Scrollback!

This looks like a really interesting project, but it seems really strange to make performance such a high priority. I tried the find /usr test, and it seemed equally fast in Terminal.app and Alacritty.

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#106

Post by eduren »

ggame wrote: post #84
elcritch wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, just as interesting, plugging this into VR system! Make it way easier to multitask and work on lots of systems (at the risk of looking incredibly goofy).

Sadly VR is useless for reading :( I wish it wasn't so. You're much better off with a high resolution screen with the ability to zoom in and out between landmarks. Maybe a head tracker to make navigation more intuitive.

Hopefully that changes with the next bump in pixel density. Aggressive supersampling already is getting close to readable.

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#107

Post by jwilm »

steveklabnik wrote: post #53
llimllib wrote: post #35

> Make sure you have the right Rust compiler installed. Alacritty is currently pinned to a certain Rust nightly Ok, I'll... um not do that. Hope you publish a build soon though! edit: more seriously, the nightly compiler situation on rust is going to become a problem as it gets more developer use. I really hope they're able to stabilize it. edit 2: I'm really sorry if I derailed the conversation in a not useful way,…

Looking at the code, it looks like this basically only relies on two things: inclusive ranges, and clippy. But you don't have to use clippy this way; it's just one way of doing it. So it's really one feature. EDIT: Oh oops, and custom derive, which is stable in a month. > I really hope they're able to stabilize it In general, "nightly" is never going to be stabilized. Remember, it's how Rust development works. Some p…

Just for completeness, there is one other major unstable feature that Alacritty requires. #![feature(step_trait)].

I forget the precise details, but I believe this was required for using newtype wrappers as a `Range` for indexing. Specifically, the grid can be indexed as a range like

    grid[Line..Line]

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#109

Post by jwilm »

fvargas wrote: post #75

> Welcome to nginx! > If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and working. Further configuration is required. On jwilm.io -- Just wanted to let you know

Should probably redirect that to the blog; thanks for the notice!

Re: Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust

#110

Post by Florin_Andrei »

brandur wrote: post #52
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and scrollback are unnecessary Um... that's kind of a deal breaker to me. Really no scrollback at all?

Just to present an alternate opinion here: I haven't used my terminal's scrollback on purpose in 5+ years now, and it's fine. To me, Alacritty's trade off is perfectly acceptable, and even desirable. As far as I can tell, using Tmux's scrollback instead has no downsides of note, but some _very_ significant upsides. For example, (1) shared buffer between terminal windows, and (2) copy/paste modes that are usable with…

Hm. So, for that to work, I'd basically have to forever hardcode the terminal to launch tmux every single time. Basically, this new terminal + tmux = the old terminal behavior.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing (haven't tried it), I'm just saying this is the way to get my scrollback... uh... back.

Might as well ship the terminal with tmux as a hard dependency and launch a tmux child process by default.

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