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 FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, and OpenBSD. 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)
• 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

Debian/Ubuntu

Using cargo deb, you can create and install a deb file.

git clone https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty.git
cd alacritty
cargo install cargo-deb
cargo deb --install

openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux

zypper in alacritty

Void Linux

xbps-install alacritty

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 and alacritty_macos.yml at the git repository root for Linux and macOS respectively.

Alacritty looks for the configuration file at 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 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.

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.

• 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.

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.