Use Alacritty instead of Termite • Hacker News Board

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#21

Post by twic » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

siver_john wrote: post #9

I find this kind of interaction interesting having used both termite and alacritty. Honestly I would have never expected maintainers of what I perceived as a fairly popular terminal to just go, welp use the other guys. This is kind of neat. I had already been using alacritty for a while because it had wayland support, even though it has some weird bugs on my current i3 setup where creating a new terminal just creates…

I think the explanation lies here:

> VTE is a terrible base for building a modern, fast and safe terminal emulator. It's slow, brittle and difficult to improve.

It sounds like the maintainers of termite had a miserable time dealing with VTE, and are glad to see the back of it.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#22

Post by Iwan-Zotow » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

hyperpl wrote: post #18

kohlerm wrote: post #10

I liked termite because of the keyboard based selection mode and the minimal functionality. Wasn't aware that Alacrity supports that now. Alacrity is my choice for Windows, but unfortunately I cannot use it on WSL2, because it needs GLX features, which are not available. I hope I can soon use the new WSL2 graphics support

I didn't know alacrity was supported on Windows. Can it be used in place of putty as well?

Is it better than native Windows terminal?

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#23

Post by Cloudef » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

Used to use termite for years before moving to alacritty, I'm glad it has keyboard hints navigation now. Thanks thestinger for the great terminal emulator.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#24

Post by bionade24 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

cies wrote: post #6

And slowly the world got a rewrite in Rust… :)

RiR wouldn't be a meme and so controversial if the Rewriters didn't often rewrite common tools strongly opinionated, excluding everyone from a potential merge discussion of new features.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#25

Post by shassard » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

aDfbrtVt wrote: post #5

Does Alacritty still require you to copy terminfo to remote servers in order for backspace to work? I loved Alacritty, but copying terminfo every time gets old pretty quickly.

alacritty's default terminal is indeed still quite foreign to most machines but it can fallback to xterm compatibility by overriding the TERM variable in your alacritty.yml:

  env:
    TERM: xterm-256color

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#26

Post by nathias » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

Alacritty is very slow on startup, I use a tiling manager and spawn new terminals frequently so this is very noticeable. I use st which is super fast and has everything I need available through patches

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#27

Post by dleslie » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

bhaak wrote: post #3

> GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use. Choose your dependencies wisely. Sometimes only a crystal ball would have helped but often, a little bit of due dilligence would have prevented lots of upgrade pain down the line.

Gnome has a fairly negative rep now, thanks in part to its repeated spurning of feature requests from developers and users.

I remember when the Gnome desktop was exciting; there were frequently new apps to try, things pushing niche workflows that the Gnome team didn't consider.

That all stopped with Gnome3.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#28

Post by lvass » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

bennyp101 wrote: post #19

I used to use termite, but switched to kitty for ... reasons I can't remember now. Does alacritty support ligatures yet? I've been using kitty because it does, but then I have issues with tmux in kitty ... I know, I want my cake and eat it

What issues? Attaching to a session created in another emulator? I tried switching from kitty to alacritty and it was definitely not worth it, kitty's docs, and features, are just absurdly better.

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#29

Post by Rompect » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

aDfbrtVt wrote: post #5

Does Alacritty still require you to copy terminfo to remote servers in order for backspace to work? I loved Alacritty, but copying terminfo every time gets old pretty quickly.

You can fix this by setting the following values in .config/alacritty/alacritty.yml:

    env:
      TERM: xterm-256color

Another way is described here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Terminal_function...

Re: Use Alacritty instead of Termite

#30

Post by Cloudef » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

traverseda wrote: post #16

cookguyruffles wrote: post #12

Is there any indication of the energy impact using a GL context to render plain old text? These concepts seem incompatible in the context of a laptop, and who needs GL here when the bottleneck is biological. One of my favourite working modes is shutting down everything and just hacking away in vim, partly for distraction management but primarily because of battery.

Everything is a GL context under wayland isn't it?

It's technically possible to create a wayland compositor without GL/GLES/Vulkan, but only SHM clients will work, unless you go with mixed approach which wouldn't be zero-copy. (Or of course you could also use llvmpipe or something to do software emulation of GL, but that will be very slow and ineffective). I'm not aware of any such wayland compositor however.