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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

#121

Post by Sammi »

padthai wrote: post #47
zokier wrote: 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.

Foot is Linux only and lightweight, take it as a Wayland version of Xterm with good defaults and almost no emulation options. The rest works in all major OS. Alacrity is all about GPU rendering speed at the cost of everything else (at some point it did not have scrollbars/history). Kitty and Wezterm are packed with features and more difficult to differentiate. They are all good though.

There still are no scrollbars in Alacritty: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/775

Use Wezterm is you want a modern rust based terminal with basic nice stuff like scrollbars.

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

#122

Post by Sammi »

ctenb wrote: post #23

I tried to use alacritty in the past, but moved to wezterm eventually, because of it's superior customizability and features.

Wezterm gives you basic stuff like scrollbars that Alacritty refuses to do: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/775

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

#123

Post by ubercore »

squigz wrote: post #42

What problem is having a "fast" terminal solving? I've been using urxvt for years and have never really found it to be slow. Where might I notice a difference with these "modern" "GPU-accelerated" terminals?

"fast" probably depends where you're coming from. Moving to Alacritty (and then WezTerm) from iterm2 was definitely a very noticeable difference for me, and just "felt" better. Of course iterm2 isn't exactly slow, but that feeling of UI immediacy in faster terminals does help me focus on the task at hand. If your existing terminal is fast enough to not notice, I suspect you've already hit the point of diminishing returns.

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

#124

Post by diath »

squigz wrote: post #42

What problem is having a "fast" terminal solving? I've been using urxvt for years and have never really found it to be slow. Where might I notice a difference with these "modern" "GPU-accelerated" terminals?

Yeah, I see no difference either, I used to use urxvt for years, then switched to kitty (which is also hardware accelerated like Alacritty), but not for the supposed "performance" gains but because it's got better features but I can't really tell the difference.

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

#126

Post by sgarland »

jhchabran wrote: post #69
Veraticus wrote: post #28

Still no ligature support. There are better alternatives out there — kitty is what I chose.

Same I love my ligatures to death. And there are some interesting goodies. I find the author take on `tmux` being unecessary interesting, albeit it's a quite divisive opinion. Nevertheless, it's refreshing to see the status quo being challenged. But on the other hand, while I totally understand why https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#i-get-errors-about-the-... exists, it's quite annoying to handle that, as we often…

I liked kitty, but this was part of what drove me away. My terminal at work spans the bottom half of my monitor, and is typically split into 2-3 panes. I’ll also have multiple named windows at any given time. This works amazingly well for me, and I have no desire to switch.

My other problem was having TERMINFO available on remote servers. I’m not about to start installing alternative terminal emulators in prod, and while there is a workaround to losing control characters, IIRC it’s a pain.

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

#127

Post by Tyr42 »

akx wrote: post #104
ivolimmen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. Nothing beats the "CTRL + SHIFT + G" option (open last output in less); no other terminal has it.

iTerm2: cmd+shift+a = select output of last command. I can then cmd+c, open whatever editor I want (or `pbpaste | less` if I want `less`).

TIL, thanks.

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

#128

Post by mewse »

squigz wrote: post #42

What problem is having a "fast" terminal solving? I've been using urxvt for years and have never really found it to be slow. Where might I notice a difference with these "modern" "GPU-accelerated" terminals?

I agree that I've never had a problem with terminal speeds on Linux. If you're using urxvt, that's probably going to do just fine.

Where I have had problems has been on the Mac, where the system default "Terminal.app" or popular alternatives like "iTerm2.app" can each be catastrophically slow if you have a lot of control codes (as in, for example, rapidly paging through a large document in vim with an intensive color scheme active), and it could just take noticeable fractions of a second to redraw a fullscreen terminal window.

Moving to a faster terminal emulator like alacritty or kitty did make a good quality of life improvement for me in that specific use case.

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

#129

Post by Rogach »

I moved to alacritty from gnome-terminal.

Wasn't for latency or throughput - I didn't notice any difference in latency, and difference in throughput is only visible when cat'ing 3MB of text.

However, for me the selling point was a text config file, which I can edit, backup, or store in git (unlike gnome-terminal, where customization was done either in GUI or in gconf, and while it's also text files somewhere they are difficult to work with).

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

#130

Post by eviks »

zokier wrote: 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.

wezterm is the most flexible with its lua config, big differentiator

Then being x-platform is also an easy differentiator of the 2

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