This work started because we wanted to be able to simply say "monospace"
on Linux and have it give us some sort of font. The config format for
fonts changed to accomodate this new paradigm. As a result, italic and
bold can have different families from the normal (roman) face.
The fontconfig based font resolution probably works a lot better than
the CoreText version at this point. With CoreText, we simply iterate
over fonts and check it they match the requested properties. What's
worse is that the CoreText version requires a valid family. With
fontconfig, it will just provide the closest matching thing and use it
(unless a specific style is requested).
Bindings were previously hardcoded within input.rs; adding, removing, or
changing a binding required a recompile! Now, bindings may be declared
in alacritty.yml. Even better, bindings are live-reloaded when
alacritty.yml is changed!
One unexpected benefit of this change was that all of the special casing
in input.rs has disappeared.
Conversely, config.rs has gained complexity for all of the
deserialization logic.
Resolves#3.
The upcoming Utf8Chars iterator was vendored from a libstd PR. The
iterator works on BufRead types which is critical for improving
performance. A small modification was made where the number of unused
bytes is included with Utf8CharsError::IncompleteUtf8.
The pty reader thread was updated to use this new type. Next steps will
be moving the parsing there and either sending parse results in batches
or updating the terminal directly from that thread.
Configuration may now be specified in either `$HOME/.alacritty.yml` or
`$HOME/.config/alacritty.yml`. See `alacritty.yml` in the repository
root for an example.
When a configuration file cannot be located, a default configuration is
used.
Joe Wilm