Alacritty Explained

Logo Size:85px
Author:Joe Wilm
Developer:Kirill Chibisov, Christian Dürr[1]
Platform:x86-64, IA-32

Alacritty is a free and open-source GPU-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).[2] [3] [4] A similar terminal emulator that uses OpenGL is kitty.

History

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".[5]

With the release of version 0.2.0 in September 2018 Alacritty gained support for scrollback.[6]

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.[7]

In version 0.5.0, released in July 2020, a mode with vi keybindings for searching and copying text was added.[8]

In version 0.6.0, released in November 2020, a new binding to cancel search and leave vi mode was added.[9]

Features

Alacritty supports true color in addition to the standard 16 ANSI colors.[10]

Alacritty explicitly does not support tabs or splits because similar functionality can be achieved with a terminal multiplexer or window manager.[11] [12]

Configuration

Alacritty is configured by editing a template file in TOML format.

See also

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Alacritty Open Source Project on Open Hub: Contributions Listing Page.
  2. Web site: Senthil Kumar Palani. 2019-10-29. Alacritty – A Lightweight And Blazingly Fast Terminal Emulator. 2020-07-27. OSTechNix. en-US.
  3. Web site: angeloma17. 2020-03-18. Alacritty the fastest terminal emulator for Linux. 2020-07-27. OSRadar. en-US.
  4. Web site: Morelo. David. Top 7 Best Linux Terminals – Linux Hint. 2020-07-27. en-US.
  5. Web site: Wilm. Joe. 2017-01-06. Announcing Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator. 2020-07-28. jwilm.io.
  6. Web site: Alacritty now supports scrollback. 2018-09-17. 2020-07-28. jwilm.io. Wilm. Joe.
  7. Web site: Alacritty Version 0.3.0 Release. 2019-04-07. 2020-07-28. Dürr. Christian. 2020-07-28. https://web.archive.org/web/20200728225548/https://blog.christianduerr.com/alacritty_030_announcement. dead.
  8. Web site: Alacritty Version 0.5.0 Release. 2020-07-31. 2020-08-01. christianduerr.com. Dürr. Christian. https://web.archive.org/web/20200801030904/https://blog.christianduerr.com/alacritty_0_5_0_announcement.html. 2020-08-01. live.
  9. Web site: Release Alacritty Version 0.6.0. 2020-12-19. GitHub. en.
  10. Web site: A look at terminal emulators, part 1. 2018-03-30. 2020-07-28. LWN.net. Beaupré. Antoine.
  11. Web site: GitHub - alacritty/Alacritty at v0.4.3. GitHub.
  12. Web site: Alacritty – A Fastest Terminal Emulator for Linux. 2020-06-05. 2020-07-28. TecMint. Kili. Aaron.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alacritty".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2024, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.