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) and NixOS (at the moment in unstable, will be part of 17.09), 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

1. Alacritty requires the most recent stable Rust compiler; it can be installed with rustup.

   Note: DO NOT use the Homebrew Rust compiler on macOS (see FAQ for explanation).

Installing Rust compiler with rustup

1. Install rustup.rs.

2. Clone the source code:

   git clone https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty.git
   cd alacritty
   

3. Make sure you have the right Rust compiler installed. 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

CentOS/RHEL 7

On CentOS/RHEL 7, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a yum command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

yum 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 fontconfig-devel

NixOS/Nixpkgs

The following command can be used to get a shell with all development dependencies on NixOS.

nix-shell -A alacritty '<nixpkgs>'

Gentoo

On Gentoo, there's a portage overlay available. Make sure layman is installed and run:

sudo layman -a slyfox

Then, add x11-terms/alacritty ** to /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords and emerge alacritty:

sudo emerge alacritty

It might be handy to mask all other packages provided in the slyfox overlay by adding */*::slyfox to /etc/portage/package.mask and adding x11-terms/alacritty::slyfox to /etc/portage/package.unmask.

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

To build an application for macOS, run

make app
cp -r target/release/osx/Alacritty.app /Applications/Alacritty.app

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:

1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.yml
2. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.yml
3. $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml
4. $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 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.

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 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.
• Is wayland supported? Sort of, but not everything works. To prefer X11 over 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.