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

Post by Manishearth » Fri, Jan 06, 2017, 10:40 PM UTC

computerphage wrote: post #159

uep wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's nice that they want to converge on rustup, I greatly prefer using my distro-provided compiler in almost all cases. Right now that is rustc 1.14, which means that that alacritty is currently beyond my compilation capability. I don't think this is nearly as bad as the grandparent suggested though. The language is young, I'd prefer experimental features remain in the experimental branch rather than get bad de…

Don't worry. The Rust community is sensitive to the desire to only install Rust with a package manager. There was even talk (a few days ago) of making an LTS version of the Rust compiler for use in more conservative distros that don't want to update it every 6 weeks. On another front, Rust is working hard to get people off of nightly. This project, for example, uses 3 unstable features. Clippy can already work on sta…

Post by arandomcoder » Fri, Jan 06, 2017, 10:41 PM UTC

lobster_johnson wrote: post #200

arandomcoder wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. Alacritty follows the Unix philosophy of doing one thing, and doing it well. I used to think that terminal scrollback and tabs were great ideas -- but switching to tmux changed my mind completely. Tmux is so much more capable for managing your session history. The terminal's tab and scrollback features can never match this. They're just bloat :p

> Alacritty follows the Unix philosophy of doing one thing, and doing it well. That principle is often misapplied, and I think that's true here, too. The "do one thing" about Unix is really about composability (e.g. "find" doesn't need to sort because you do "find | sort"), but you don't compose a terminal app with anything. A terminal app that has terminal features doesn't violate any principles of simplicity.

Post by mifix » Fri, Jan 06, 2017, 10:43 PM UTC

rjayatilleka wrote: post #116

jwilm wrote: post #2

I'm the author of Alacritty, and I'm here to answer any questions!

Very cool project, I'm trying it out, but this is an unrelated question: what is that Vim colorscheme in your screenshot? Do you have a link?

Post by nopreserveroot » Fri, Jan 06, 2017, 10:45 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #202

nopreserveroot wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how Copyleft software licenses work at all. All the AGPL gurantees is that 'Bigco' must contribute back to the community any modifications they make to the software.

The AGPL is different from the GPL. The AGPL prevents use at my Bigco (Google) for a number of good reasons.

Post by valarauca1 » Fri, Jan 06, 2017, 10:49 PM UTC

vvanders wrote: post #63

valarauca1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: With a modern discrete GPU card wouldn't the texture atlas just end up in it's VRAM as cards these days commonly have >1GB of VRAM? (Sorry if this is a stupid question, still trying to grok opengl)

Sure, but you're either going to have to generate the whole font up-front(can be many thousand characters) or you need to re-upload as you use/generate new characters which can thrash unless you're very careful about the regions you lock(and you have a driver that behaves appropriately). Most font renderers I know do a tiered LRU cache of 3-4 texture "pages" which hurts your drawcall batching but tends to be a nice t…