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

blog.jwilm.io

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

#241

Post by vectorpush »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #110
brandur wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a tmux workflow, you're generally not spawning that many new terminal windows, instead you ^a+c to spawn a new tty within tmux.

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

#242

Post by vectorpush »

For those who rely on tabs, one great advantage of relying on the multiplexer instead is that your "tabs" live within the terminal, so when you ssh into your session, the machine has all your "tabs" ready and waiting instead of tied up in a non-accessible GUI.

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

#243

Post by dbaupp »

netheril96 wrote: post #232
smegger001 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or you could type CTRL+Z BG

And that will still send the program SIGUP, killing it when you close the terminal or lose your ssh session.

You can do that (or spawn in the background from the start, with &) while also using nohup.

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

#245

Post by comex »

twic wrote: post #214
nopreserveroot wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's company policy and not the fault of the license. EDIT: Unless you're making modifications to the software, the AGPL does not apply. EDIT2: http://www.affero.org/oagf.html#How_does_this_license_treat_... Specifically, the question, "How does this license treat commercial enterprise use over intranets and internal networks?"

Is that true? My understanding of the AGPL was that any software product which uses it as a component becomes subject to the AGPL - it has the linking semantics of the GPL, not the LGPL. If that's not the case, please do disabuse me of my misconception!

Yes, it is like the GPL. But in this case, where the product is a standalone application, that distinction shouldn't matter unless you're actually planning on bundling it into your own product somehow.

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

#246

Post by dbaupp »

Fnoord wrote: post #181
jwilm wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My current Bash prompt contains a unicode character. I guess this is unsupported? Multibyte characters are 100% supported, but only if they are available in the chosen font. The fallback fonts feature will resolve this issue for you. > Possible bug: on macOS when I minimize Alacritty, and I put it on focus again, it tries to select text. Strangely, not always. Definitely a bug, and it's one that I knowingly shipped…

> Multibyte characters are 100% supported, but only if they are available in the chosen font. The fallback fonts feature will resolve this issue for you. How do I enable this feature? The characters  and ⑂ don't work in Menlo.  and  do work in Cousine for Powerline font. In Terminal.App and iTerm2 this works in both fonts. Do those applications also have a fallback fonts feature?

It's mentioned in the article as one of the yet-to-be-implemented features.

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

#247

Post by joshuata »

atombender wrote: post #136
WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #95

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…

> Features like ... are better provided by a terminal multiplexer I would strongly argue that this thinking is putting the cart before the horse. I don't use tmux, nor do I want to (though occasionally I have to use screen as a hack to keep programs running on remote servers, and I hate every second of it). Solutions like tmux arguably exist because terminals have poor UIs, and the terminal protocol is too weak to fo…

I love tmux since I regularly move between OSX and linux machines across several versions. With tmux I can create one .tmux.conf file that standardizes my tab/split behavior across all of the systems regardless of the emulator I use. This works a lot better for me than having to install specific emulators on each machine, several of which I do not have administrative rights over.

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

#248

Post by readittwice »

so this uses GPU-accelerated rendering with OpenGL. TBH I have never used OpenGL and when I read "GPU-accelerated XYZ" this still sounds like magic to me because I've know idea how this works. Could you point me to some resources where I can read up on this stuff? if this helps you: I am not a newbie, I already know C, C++ and Rust, but I haven't done any graphics programming at all yet. For example I only have a very rough idea what shaders do.

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

#249

Post by dvt »

jwilm wrote: post #115
dvt wrote: 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).

I didn't realize there's no Windows version available yet, I was totally thinking about my Windows laptop. My Apple (work) laptop is much better about not turning on fans willy-nilly.

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

#250

Post by coldtea »

jwilm wrote: post #60
ekidd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted to say that this looks like a fantastic and very cool project! Congratulations on the speed. Personally, the lack of scrollback and tabs is a dealbreaker for me. I know that I'm supposed to use tmux for that, but I can never remember how tmux scrollback and tab switching work without thinking about them. Plus I rely heavily on mouse selection of multi-screen text in the scrollback buffer. So I'm unlikel…

> Personally, the lack of scrollback and tabs is a dealbreaker for me Completely understandable. This decision was expected to be polarizing. > Do you support color emoji in the Terminal? I've never quite managed to get it working on Linux. Not yet. Fallback fonts, wide chars, and a number of other font rendering items are part of the 1.0 milestone.

>Completely understandable. This decision was expected to be polarizing.

The project being OK with polarizing decisions (instead of listening to the community and discussing it) is the dealbreaker for me.

It's OK to build opinionated software, but not at such basic level.

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