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

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111–120 of 491 posts

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

#112

I really disagree with the authors definition of minimal. Terminal emulators have such a minimal user interface as it is it's a bit boggling that I have to make the case for the following "bloat" that other terminal emulators have. I need scrollback because I do occasionally pick up my mouse and grab things that have scrolled off the screen. Tmux doesn't help with this but maybe there is some magic that I don't know…

Yeah, that was my reaction.

> Features like GUI-based configuration, tabs and scrollback are unnecessary. The latter features are better provided by a terminal multiplexer like tmux.

This seems kind of like saying "everyone should use their computer the same way I do". I don't use tmux; maybe I should learn to use it. However, I seem to be getting along fine without it, and no scroll back is a deal-breaker for me.

That said, this is still a cool project and I wish them success.

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

#113

I really disagree with the authors definition of minimal. Terminal emulators have such a minimal user interface as it is it's a bit boggling that I have to make the case for the following "bloat" that other terminal emulators have. I need scrollback because I do occasionally pick up my mouse and grab things that have scrolled off the screen. Tmux doesn't help with this but maybe there is some magic that I don't know…

tmux has copy-mode (^B : copy-mode ) which lets you scroll through history and copy out snippets without using the mouse. There are also some tips out there for nested tmux sessions.

For what it's worth, I use tmux just like the author of this project: a single urxvt terminal with tmux running inside (no scrollbars, tabs, menubars, etc) and it works for me.

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

#114
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.

> You do seem overly excited. :)

Hah, yeah I'm aware, but the potential of Rust is huge.

We talk a lot about open source these days, but meanwhile the tools that we all use are sitting on huge substrates that the vast majority of us aren't contributing to and probably never will due to the complexity hurdle that needs to be overcome.

This includes our web browsers, our terminals, our editors/IDEs, our operating systems, our security software (OpenSSL, NaCL, OpenSSH), and if you're a developer, things like our databases. Although I can ostensibly write C and C++, I still don't contribute to these projects because oftentimes a whole new set of local conventions around build tools and utility libraries needs to be learned for every project, and there's a high bar of experience required before contribution is possible without the risk of introducing a memory leak or security problem.

Rust has the potential to change all of this, and that's really, really big.

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

I definitely appreciate Mathematica and its sort of rich prompt is probably closer to what a terminal should look like rather than what we have today. But most of what I'm doing all day is text editing and using companion tools like Git, which isn't a good fit for it. I'd much rather that those Mathematica utilities come to my terminal rather than me having to go to Mathematica.

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

#115
post #97

Pretty awesome, but I'm not sure if I want my GPU fans spinning if all I'm doing is looking at a terminal :P

The amount of time spent doing GPU work is rather small. Battery life tends to be better on my Macbook with Alacritty than with other terminals. This seems to suggest that power consumption is actually less than with CPU based renderers (and that your GPU fans shouldn't be spinning).

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

#117
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…

It is an amazing project! One thing to note is that the terminal emulator itself isn't GPU-accelerated (there's no parallel computations that run on the GPU), the UI graphics are only rendered by the GPU (much like in the Chrome browser).

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

#118
I really like this. It combines my love of tmux and vim with my interest in rust, system software, terminals, and my eternal quest for the fastest, simplest, most cross platform terminal development environment. Great job - looking forward to running nightly builds of this.

EDIT: Ah, after a little sleuthing, the recent post from OneSignal on why they chose rust for one of their services makes sense :).

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

#119
I really like this. It combines my love of tmux and vim with my interest in rust, system software, terminals, and my eternal quest for the fastest, simplest, most cross platform terminal development environment. Great job - looking forward to running nightly builds of this.

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

#120

I really disagree with the authors definition of minimal. Terminal emulators have such a minimal user interface as it is it's a bit boggling that I have to make the case for the following "bloat" that other terminal emulators have. I need scrollback because I do occasionally pick up my mouse and grab things that have scrolled off the screen. Tmux doesn't help with this but maybe there is some magic that I don't know…

tmux does provide full scrollback with mousewheel support too.

  # Enable mouse support including scrolling
  set -g mouse on 
  # Versions prior to 2.1 may want this too:
  set -g mouse-utf8 on
  history-limit 5000 # 5000 lines of history per pane.  Adjust as needed.
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