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Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

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Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#153

My shoutout to Ghostty (by Mitchell Hashimoto & community). Although still in beta, hands down the best terminal I've used on both Mac and Linux.

Do you know the dev, or is there a waitlist somewhere where I could possibly get access to try it out? I couldn't locate one on their site.

The closest thing is a Discord server linked in this post: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-devlog-003

Beta invites are nearly random, though.

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#154
post #134
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that usually these terminals mean "higher throughput" when they say "faster", not "lower latency". The lowest-latency terminal in every test is Xterm, often by a LOT. Alacritty for a long time was actually quite bad at latency--and notably had a high variance on its latency, which is particularly miserable--but I think it improved recently? From what I remember of these benchmarks, someone using urxvt is…

People writing fast terminal emulator care about throughput, latency and resource utilization. Kitty for instance deliberately limit throughput to keep both latency and CPU/GPU usage reasonable. Also, by what metric is xterm so fast? I accept the idea that it is fast, even the fastest, but "a lot" seems suspicious to me. From the keyboard to the monitor, there is a lot of hardware and driver latency, I guess tens of…

here is some latency tests using an external camera, though that's Windows only, there might've been a similar one for Linux, but not sure

https://chadaustin.me/2024/02/windows-terminal-latency/

The other one where xterm is uber low is https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/ is using this tool with software-based screen capture https://pavelfatin.com/typometer/, not sure how reliable that is as a proxy for end-to-end (at the time of the benchmark Wayland wasn't supported)

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#155

I tried it for a few years a while back on macOS but it somehow felt off, I don't remember why, something to do with mouse selection. I went back to iTerm2 and that's that, you couldn't view images with feh and similar tools in macOS terminals for some reason so I had no reason to stay. Out of interest, why would I want anything faster than iTerm2 anyway? Never felt that my terminal is slow.

On Mac, I have yet to find anything that can top the combo of Apple Terminal with the now-defunct Visor/TotalTerminal[0] haxie. Apple Terminal meets my needs well enough and TotalTerminal’s implementation of quake-style dropdown was the smoothest I’ve encountered on any platform.

iTerm2 has a dropdown window that can be enabled, but it’s surprisingly much more janky than TotalTerminal’s was despite being a first-party feature instead of a hack.

[0]: https://totalterminal.binaryage.com/

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#157
Moved to Alacritty from iTerm2 recently. The biggest plus was the simple text config. I actively make a lot of changes to my config (always experimenting with different shortcuts and other things) and updating configs on multiple machines (work and personal) became a headache. This solved that for me; can just commit any changes to the text file and pull on other machine.

Re: Alacritty – A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator

#158
post #14

Alacritty, foot, wezterm, kitty form this block of "nextgen" terminal emulators. I do find them difficult to differentiate. I personally use foot as my daily driver, but that is just because alacritty happened to have some issues with nvidia drivers (bleh). But I chalk that up to nvidia, not alacritty.

I haven't stumbled upon any issues with alacritty + nvidia (lucky, perhaps). Though, mostly, I use vterm in emacs (unmatched customization & integration)
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