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To make things easier to understand for Windows users, the relationship between Alacritty and the WinPTY agent has been clarified in the documentation. This also bundles the windows agent and exe together in a zip file to make distribution for windows easier on the user.
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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, Linux, and Windows.
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 are available from the GitHub releases page.
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)
- Alacritty Lands Scrollback, Publishes Benchmarks September 17, 2018
Installation
Some operating systems already provide binaries for Alacritty, for everyone else the instructions to build Alacritty from source can be found here.
Arch Linux
pacman -S alacritty
openSUSE Tumbleweed
zypper in alacritty
Void Linux
xbps-install alacritty
Gentoo Linux
emerge x11-terms/alacritty
Mageia 7+
urpmi alacritty
FreeBSD
pkg install alacritty
NixOS
nix-env -iA nixos.alacritty
Solus
eopkg install alacritty
macOS
brew cask install alacritty
Once the cask is installed, it is recommended to setup the manual page, shell completions, and terminfo definitions.
Windows
Via Scoop
scoop bucket add extras
scoop install alacritty
Other
Prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows can be downloaded from the GitHub releases page.
To work properly on Windows, Alacritty requires winpty to emulate UNIX's PTY API.
The agent is a single binary (winpty-agent.exe) which must be in the same
directory as the Alacritty executable and is available through the
GitHub releases page.
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 at the following paths:
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.yml$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.yml$HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml$HOME/.alacritty.yml
If none 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 and dimensions sections
which requires Alacritty to be restarted. For further explanation of the config
file, please consult the comments in the default config file.
Windows
On Windows the config file is located at:
%APPDATA%\alacritty\alacritty.yml
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
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 iTerm2 and Terminal.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.
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.
IRC
Alacritty discussion can be found in #alacritty on freenode.
Wayland
Wayland support is available, but not everything works as expected. Many people
have found a better experience using XWayland which can be achieved launching
Alacritty with the WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable cleared:
env WAYLAND_DISPLAY= alacritty
If you're interested in seeing our Wayland support improve, please head over to the Wayland meta issue on the winit project to see how you may contribute.
License
Alacritty is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.