Alacritty
Stable release
Original author(s)	Joe Wilm^[1]
Developer(s)	Kirill Chibisov, Christian Dürr^[2]
Repository
Written in	Rust
Operating system	macOS, Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD
Platform	x86-64, IA-32
License	Apache Software License, Version 2.0

Alacritty Ubuntu

Alacritty is a free and open-sourceGPU accelerated terminal emulator focused on performance and simplicity. Consequently, it does not support tabs or splits and is configured by editing a text file. It is written in Rust and uses OpenGL (for performance).^[4]^[5]^[6]. Similar terminal emulator that uses OpenGL is Kitty.

Alacritty is the fastest open source terminal emulator there is. How is it the fastest? With such a strong focus on simplicity and performance, Alacritty’s included features are very carefully considered, ensuring that it remains blazingly fast. It’s got a GPU for rendering that makes a whole lot of optimizations possible. Install the alacritty package or alacritty-git AUR for the development version. Alacritty searches for a configuration file at the following places in this order: $XDGCONFIGHOME/alacritty/alacritty.yml $XDGCONFIGHOME/alacritty.yml $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml $HOME/.alacritty.yml. Homebrew’s package index.

Alacritty is the default terminal emulator in Sway.^[7]

History[edit]

Joe Wilm announced Alacritty in his blog on 6 January 2017. He describes it as 'the result of frustration with existing terminal emulators. Using vim inside tmux in many terminals was a particularly bad experience. None of them were ever quite fast enough'. He found urxvt and st difficult to configure and criticized their 'inability to run on non-X11 platforms'.^[1]

With the release of version 0.2.0 in September 2018 Alacritty gained support for scrollback.^[8]

In version 0.3.0, released in April 2019, Alacritty entered beta stage and support for Windows, text reflow, and clicking on URLs was added.^[9]

In version 0.5.0, released in July 2020, a mode with vi keybindings for searching and copying text was added.^[10]

In version 0.6.0, released in November 2020, a new Ctrl+C binding to cancel search and leave vi mode was added.^[11]

Features[edit]

Alacritty supports true color in addition to the standard 16 ANSI colors.^[12]

Alacritty explicitly does not support tabs or splits because similar functionality can be achieved with a terminal multiplexer or window manager.^[13]^[14]

Configuration[edit]

Alacritty is configured by editing a template file in YAML format, for example:^[5]

References[edit]

^ ^a^bWilm, Joe (2017-01-06). 'Announcing Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator'. jwilm.io. Retrieved 2020-07-28.
^https://www.openhub.net/p/alacritty/contributors
^'Release 0.7.2'. 20 February 2021. Retrieved 9 March 2021.
^Senthil Kumar Palani (2019-10-29). 'Alacritty – A Lightweight And Blazingly Fast Terminal Emulator'. OSTechNix. Retrieved 2020-07-27.
^ ^a^bangeloma17 (2020-03-18). 'Alacritty the fastest terminal emulator for Linux'. OSRadar. Retrieved 2020-07-27.
^Morelo, David. 'Top 7 Best Linux Terminals – Linux Hint'. Retrieved 2020-07-27.
^DeVault, Drew (2019-09-26). 'config.in: set default term to alacritty'.
^Wilm, Joe (2018-09-17). 'Alacritty now supports scrollback'. jwilm.io. Retrieved 2020-07-28.
^Dürr, Christian (2019-04-07). 'Alacritty Version 0.3.0 Release'. Retrieved 2020-07-28.
^Dürr, Christian (2020-07-31). 'Alacritty Version 0.5.0 Release'. christianduerr.com. Archived from the original on 2020-08-01. Retrieved 2020-08-01.
^'Release Alacritty Version 0.6.0'. GitHub. Retrieved 2020-12-19.
^Beaupré, Antoine (2018-03-30). 'A look at terminal emulators, part 1'. LWN.net. Retrieved 2020-07-28.
^https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/tree/v0.4.3#faq
^Kili, Aaron (2020-06-05). 'Alacritty – A Fastest Terminal Emulator for Linux'. TecMint. Retrieved 2020-07-28.

Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alacritty&oldid=1016537372'

Alacritty might just be the fastest cross-platform terminal emulator in existence. You can easily customize it to your liking by creating a .ymlconfig file. Alacritty doesn’t create the config file for you, but it looks for one in the following locations:

Linux/macOS

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.yml
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.yml
$HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml
$HOME/.alacritty.yml

Windows

- %APPDATA%alacrittyalacritty.yml

NOTE: you can referrence the default alacritty.ymlconfig file here.

Ok, now that we took care of the config file, let’s apply a theme. You have two options here: You can either search for themes and manually copy-paste the color scheme into your alacritty.ymlconfig file or use a CLI tool called alacritty-themes which comes preconfigured with over 150 themes.

Install Alacritty Debian

INSTALLATION

Install Alacritty Macos

Install with npm: npm i -g alacritty-themes
If you are using npx you don’t have to install the package: npx alacritty-themes
Arch Linux ( and derivates ) users can install alacritty-themes from the AUR.

Alacritty Terminal

USAGE

Once installed, all you have to do is run alacritty-themes. Choose the theme from the list of options by typing the theme name and press Enter to apply. You can also navigate with j and k keys for up/down.

The list of options are cycled through automatically so you can go to the last theme by just pressing up arrow key. The search is fuzzy so you can enter any part of the theme name to search.

If you don’t have a config file already in place, alacritty-themes will create one for you. Applying a theme will take immediate effect. Otherwise, just restart alacritty.

Also, you can aliasalacritty-themes to at to save time.