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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

#61

Post by theonething »

Myrmornis wrote: post #45
karolist wrote: post #17

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.

The main problem with iTerm2 is that the configuration is not via plain text and so it's impossible to keep track of your config in git. (I did try the dynamic profiles feature for a couples of years, but it's not the same). I use alacritty now, but I'm sure wezterm etc are also great.

in Settings -> General -> Preferences is a checkbox labeled "Load preferences from a custom folder or URL. I have that checked and the configs are saved in a text file of plist format.

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

#62

Post by jhchabran »

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?

The delay in between typing and seeing it rendered, drawing large portions of text (which matters if you spend a lot of time in term based editors) etc ...

It's very subjective: some folks (me included) will notice the difference and feel frustrated if it's not fast enough, while others are scratching their head about how it actually makes a difference.

It could also be said, that it's of logical to expect certain things to be fast; especially when they've been around for so long. We're drawing text on the screen here, it should be fast.

Saying it matters with anything else than feeling/comfort would be overreaching.

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

#63

Post by jmacc93 »

I use Alacritty and really like it :). I use it primarily for scripts and other cases where I want a terminal to open extremely fast. Some day I'll get around to finding a way to easily use tabs in it and I can replace Terminator (which I also really like and use, of course; but its a lot slower to open)

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

#64

Post by lupusreal »

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?

urxvt and xterm are also fast terminals. The noticably slow ones are gnome-terminal, konsole, etc. They have pretty bad latency in the time between pressing a key and that letter appearing on screen.

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

#65

Post by grawp »

bjoli wrote: post #30

It says to use a multiplexer for tabs and splits, but doesn't that negate some of the performance claims? Tmux and screen are pretty notorious for slowing things down.

I use window manager for tabs as it should be. No need for some stinky multiplexer.

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

#66

Post by aumerle »

skywal_l wrote: post #43
la_oveja wrote: post #4

i do prefer kitty[0] if i want a modern terminal emulator [0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty

My understanding is that kitty has an automatic (opt-out) update feature [0][1]. I don't really like the idea of a terminal doing that. However I like the fact that kitty developer(s) actively improved the state of the terminal emulation with their new keyboard and graphic protocols [2]. [0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2481 [1] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544 [2] https://news.ycombinator.…

Nope, that's an update notification not an update. And its opt-in if you use kitty via a distribution package and opt-out if you use the standalone kitty binaries distributed by the developer. See https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.update_check...

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

#67

Post by skywal_l »

aumerle wrote: post #66
skywal_l wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that kitty has an automatic (opt-out) update feature [0][1]. I don't really like the idea of a terminal doing that. However I like the fact that kitty developer(s) actively improved the state of the terminal emulation with their new keyboard and graphic protocols [2]. [0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2481 [1] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544 [2] https://news.ycombinator.…

Nope, that's an update notification not an update. And its opt-in if you use kitty via a distribution package and opt-out if you use the standalone kitty binaries distributed by the developer. See https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.update_check...

Funny, I always use the binaries distributed by the developers whenever I can thinking that the less intermediaries the better. Maybe I need to revise that position.

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

#68

Post by _lvbh »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #5
_lvbh wrote: post #3

Alacritty doesn’t do well with modifier keys and a lot of keyboard shortcuts don’t work in neovim by default. I recommend using foot instead.

Can you give an example? I've never hit that, but I might not be using it that hard

Any shortcuts with control/alt don’t work unless you add keybindings to the config with escape sequences. Some distros give you the config by default but that breaks other things such as jumping to the start of a command with ctrl+a

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

#69

Post by jhchabran »

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 take this bit for granted.

It makes sense from a tech pov, but not from a product one. It's a choice and I respect that. It didn't prevent me to use Kitty for years.

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

#70

Post by serial_dev »

jmacc93 wrote: post #63

I use Alacritty and really like it :). I use it primarily for scripts and other cases where I want a terminal to open extremely fast. Some day I'll get around to finding a way to easily use tabs in it and I can replace Terminator (which I also really like and use, of course; but its a lot slower to open)

I went with learning tmux, it's the industry standard, it has tabs (windows), you can customize it.

Although the learning curve was a bit steeper than what I wanted just to have tabs, it works reliably unlike other things I found.

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