Debian-based distributions provide a standard interface to launch a
terminal via the x-terminal-emulator name. In order for a terminal
emualtor to satisfy that interface, it must
* Be VT100 compatiable
* Support the "-e <command> <args>" CLI option
* Support the "-T <title>" CLI option
Adjust the short form of --title accordingly, providing -t as an alias
to avoid breaking any existing usage.
This patch adds a new mechanism for changing configuration options
without editing the configuration file, by sending options to running
instances through `alacritty msg`.
Each window will load Alacritty's configuration file by default and then
accept IPC messages for config updates using the `alacritty msg config`
subcommand. By default all windows will be updated, individual windows
can be addressed using `alacritty msg config --window-id
"$ALACRITTY_WINDOW_ID"`.
Each option will replace the config's current value and cannot be reset
until Alacritty is restarted or the option is overwritten with a new
value.
Configuration options are passed in the format `field.subfield=value`,
where `value` is interpreted as yaml.
Closes#472.
This adds the ability to pass title and class over IPC via the
create-window subcommand, so users can run only one instance for windows
of different spurposes in the window managers of their choice.
Alacritty's `msg create-window` subcommand would previously inherit all
the CLI parameters from the original executable. However not only could
this lead to unexpected behavior, it also prevents multi-window users
from making use of parameters like `-e`, `--working-directory`, or
`--hold`.
This is solved by adding a JSON-based message format to the IPC socket
messages which instructs the Alacritty server on which CLI parameters
should be used to create the new window.
Fixes#5562.
Fixes#5561.
Fixes#5560.
The current completions required a lot of domain-specific knowledge
about each individual shell and their completion functionality. Much of
which is sparsely documented.
While clap does not generate perfect completions, since parameters like
`-e` are missing completions, it does a reasonable job while requiring
no work on writing these completions.
Since access to `cli.rs` isn't possible from the `build.rs`, these
completions aren't always generated on build. Instead a test verifies
that there has been no changes to these completions and provides a
simple code sample for re-generating them. This should provide a simple
solution with minimal overhead.
Previously Alacritty would always initialize only a single terminal
emulator window feeding into the winit event loop, however some
platforms like macOS expect all windows to be spawned by the same
process and this "daemon-mode" can also come with the advantage of
increased memory efficiency.
The event loop has been restructured to handle all window-specific
events only by the event processing context with the associated window
id. This makes it possible to add new terminal windows at any time using
the WindowContext::new function call.
Some preliminary tests have shown that for empty terminals, this reduces
the cost of additional terminal emulators from ~100M to ~6M. However at
this point the robustness of the daemon against issues with individual
terminals has not been refined, making the reliability of this system
questionable.
New windows can be created either by using the new `CreateNewWindow`
action, or with the `alacritty msg create-window` subcommand. The
subcommand sends a message to an IPC socket which Alacritty listens on,
its location can be found in the `ALACRITTY_SOCKET` environment
variable.
Fixes#607.
