3cdba29124
The InstanceData type in the rendering subsystem was previously 16 floats which occupied a total of 64 bytes per instance. This meant that for every character or background cell drawn, 64 bytes were sent to the GPU. In the case of a 400x100 cell grid, a total of 2.5MB would be sent. This patch reduces InstanceData's size to 26 bytes, a 60% improvement! Using the above example for comparison, a worst case of 1MB would be transferred. The motivation for this patch comes from macOS. Once the terminal grid would reach a certain size, performance experienced a sharp and dramatic drop (render times would go from ~3ms to ~16ms). I don't want to speculate too much on the underlying issue, but suffice it to say that this patch alleviates the problem in my testing. |
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| copypasta | ||
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| .agignore | ||
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| .travis.yml | ||
| Alacritty.desktop | ||
| alacritty.info | ||
| alacritty.yml | ||
| alacritty_macos.yml | ||
| build.rs | ||
| Cargo.lock | ||
| Cargo.toml | ||
| LICENSE-APACHE | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README.md | ||
| TASKS.md | ||
Alacritty
Alacritty is the fastest terminal emulator in existence. Using the GPU for rendering enables optimizations that simply aren't possible in other emulators. Alacritty currently supports macOS and Linux, and Windows support is planned before the 1.0 release.
About
Alacritty is focused on simplicity and performance. The performance goal means it should be faster than any other terminal emulator available. The simplicity goal means that it doesn't have features such as tabs or splits (which can be better provided by a window manager or terminal multiplexer) nor niceties like a GUI config editor.
The software is considered to be at an alpha level of readiness--there are missing features and bugs to be fixed, but it is already used by many as a daily driver.
Precompiled binaries will eventually be made available on supported platforms. This is minimally blocked on a stable config format. For now, Alacritty must be built from source.
Further information
- Announcing Alacritty, a GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator January 6, 2017
- A short talk about Alacritty at the Rust Meetup January 2017 (starts at 57:00)
Installation
Instructions are provided for macOS and many Linux variants to compile Alacritty from source. With the exception of Arch (which has a package in the AUR), please first read the prerequisites section, then find the section for your OS, and finally go to building and configuration.
Arch Linux
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/alacritty-git.git
cd alacritty-git
makepkg -isr
Manual Installation
Prerequisites
-
Install
rustup.rs. DO NOT use the Homebrew Rust compiler on macOS (see FAQ for explanation). -
Clone the source code:
git clone https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty.git cd alacritty -
Make sure you have the right Rust compiler installed. Alacritty requires at least 1.15. Run
rustup override set stable rustup update stable
Ubuntu
On Ubuntu, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's an apt
command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be
missing, please open an issue.
apt-get install cmake libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev xclip
Arch Linux
On Arch Linux, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a
pacman command that should install all of them. If something is still found
to be missing, please open an issue.
pacman -S cmake freetype2 fontconfig pkg-config make xclip
Fedora
On Fedora, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a dnf
command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be
missing, please open an issue.
dnf install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip
openSUSE
On openSUSE, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's
a zypper command that should install all of them. If something is
still found to be missing, please open an issue.
zypper install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip
Slackware
Compiles out of the box for 14.2 For copy & paste support (middle mouse button) you need to install xclip https://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/misc/xclip/?search=xclip
Void Linux
On Void Linux, install following packages before compiling Alacritty:
xbps-install cmake freetype-devel freetype expat-devel fontconfig xclip
FreeBSD
On FreeBSD, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a pkg
command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be
missing, please open an issue.
pkg install cmake freetype2 fontconfig xclip pkgconf
Solus
On Solus, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a
eopkg command that should install all of them. If something is still found
to be missing, please open an issue.
sudo eopkg install freetype2-devel fontconfig-devel
Other
If you build Alacritty on another distribution, we would love some help filling in this section of the README.
Building
Once all the prerequisites are installed, compiling Alacritty should be easy:
cargo build --release
If all goes well, this should place a binary at target/release/alacritty.
BEFORE YOU RUN IT: Install the config file as described below; otherwise,
many things (such as arrow keys) will not work. If you're on macOS, you'll need
to change the monospace font family to something like Menlo.
Desktop Entry
Many linux distributions support desktop entries for adding applications to system menus. To install the desktop entry for Alacritty, run
sudo cp target/release/alacritty /usr/local/bin # or anywhere else in $PATH
cp Alacritty.desktop ~/.local/share/applications
Configuration
Although it's possible the default configuration would work on your system,
you'll probably end up wanting to customize it anyhow. There is a default
alacritty.yml at the git repository root. Alacritty looks for the
configuration file as the following paths:
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.yml$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.yml$HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml$HOME/.alacritty.yml
If neither of these paths are found then $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.yml
is created once alacritty is first run. On most systems this often defaults
to $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml.
Many configuration options will take effect immediately upon saving changes to
the config file. The only exception is the font, dimensions and dpi
sections which requires Alacritty to be restarted. For further explanation of
the config file, please consult the comments in the default config file.
Issues (known, unknown, feature requests, etc)
If you run into a problem with Alacritty, please file an issue. If you've got a
feature request, feel free to ask about it. Keep in mind that Alacritty is very
much not looking to be a feature-rich terminal emulator with all sorts of bells
and widgets. It's primarily a cross-platform, blazing fast tmux renderer that
Just Works.
FAQ
- proc-macro derive panicked during macOS build; what's wrong? There's an
issue with the Rust compiler from Homebrew. Please follow the instructions
and use
rustup. - Is it really the fastest terminal emulator? In the terminals I've benchmarked against, alacritty is either faster, WAY faster, or at least neutral. There are no benchmarks in which I've found Alacritty to be slower.
- macOS + tmux + vim is slow! I thought this was supposed to be fast! This
appears to be an issue outside of terminal emulators; either macOS has an IPC
performance issue, or either tmux or vim (or both) have a bug. This same issue
can be seen in
iTerm2andTerminal.app. I've found that if tmux is running on another machine which is connected to Alacritty via SSH, this issue disappears. Actual throughput and rendering performance are still better in Alacritty. - Is wayland supported? Not yet. Alacritty is currently on a fork of glutin
that needs some updates to work with Wayland. To stop glutin from detecting
Wayland (e.g. for use on XWayland) launch Alacritty like this:
env WAYLAND_DISPLAY= alacritty - When will Windows support be available? When someone has time to work on it. Contributors would be welcomed :).
- My arrow keys don't work. It sounds like you deleted some key bindings from your config file. Please reference the default config file to restore them.
- Why doesn't it support scrollback? Alacritty's original purpose was to provide a better experience when using tmux which already handled scrollback. The scope of this project has since expanded, and scrollback will eventually be added.
IRC
Alacritty discussion can be found in #alacritty on freenode.
License
Alacritty is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.