
Alacritty v0.5 - sbt567
https://blog.christianduerr.com/alacritty_0_5_0_announcement.html
======
tlackemann
Been using Alacritty on my Linux desktop for the better part of the year and
it's been simply a joy. It convinced me to install it on my mac and windows
machines too.

I know it's just a terminal and very mundane to be excited by, but the
performance shows if you're a heavy command line user. tail logs look
smoother, typing never lags, really well done.

~~~
1_player
Given its enormous latency, is that all placebo effect?

~~~
globular-toast
I'm sure it is. I use it because it works well in my config, specifically I
was able to configure the fonts the way I wanted it. Before that I used xterm
and it was absolutely fine. Typing lag? Please. The only terminals I've ever
seen performance issues are the Mac ones like iTerm 2.

~~~
chacha2
Here's a YouTuber doing some tests.

[https://youtu.be/PZPMvTvUf1Y?t=586](https://youtu.be/PZPMvTvUf1Y?t=586)

Was a lot faster there.

~~~
bsdubernerd
Displaying gobs of output in a terminal is pretty much the most useless
benchmark you can do for a terminal emulator. You never watch output that goes
by faster than you can read, unless you're actively watching movies through
aalib or libcaca.

I would be happy to have a "framedrop" equivalent for terminals when this
happens, as it's totally useless from my perspective.

Not to say that optimizing throughput it's useless (total time adds up over
the course of a day), but latency and start-up time are really what matters in
a terminal emulator.

It's also hard to measure correctly, because some terminal features such as
output reflow and ligature support hide major spikes in latency that you only
experience occasionally but can be incredibly annoying (say hi to all url
regex matchers!).

alacritty felt absolutely abysmal in the latency department when I last tried
it one year ago, which is even worse than most libvte based terminals.

kitty is much better, but it's not exactly a lightweight terminal. It still
starts in no less than a full second compared to mere a tenth of a second of
urxvt, xterm or mlterm. urxvt always felt more consistent to me, but all three
outclass pretty much all other terminals I ever tried.

For those using a tiling window manager, the built-in tabbing and multi-window
support is pretty much useless too. Having true-color support is probably the
only big argument I can see, which is nice to have for inband images, but
again.. something rarely used in practice.

~~~
jlokier
> You never watch output that goes by faster than you can read, unless you're
> actively watching movies through aalib or libcaca.

This is not true for me.

During development I often run programs that spew an enormous quantity of log
output, and I'm watching to see if I notice a pattern in the output visually,
or if it just looks normal. Either some critical or warning message in a
different colour or boldface, or a shape to the messages that I'd recognise.

Although in principle I could use various output filters, grep etc., sometimes
that's effort and I'd rather just run the thing and have it run quickly.

Also it's convenient to have all the output readily available if I do want to
look at something that happened, as I can scroll to that place and look at
pages of surrounding context in detail. If I use output filters, then I have
to faff about re-running the program with different filters, or with all
outputs enabled so I can step through everything around the event of interest.

Admittedly sometimes its better to output to a file and search the file, but
sometimes visual output at 60Hz works quite well.

I have been known to skim manuals very fast as well. I guess in the era when
man pages were everything, I got used to scrolling really fast to look for
things of interest. It's interesting that a brain is able to recognise
particular word-forms that flick by extremely fast, much faster than reading
them. I've had people tell me they cannot do this, so I guess it's a learned
skill.

~~~
pmoriarty
Not only that, but when some terminal program decides to spew a bunch of
output again and you don't want to interrupt it, you're going to have to wait
until it's finished before you regain control.

No one wants to waste their time waiting for something that could be done
already.

So faster terminal output can make a real, useful difference in everyday use.

~~~
jlokier
For this situation, an action to skip output until it settles would be even
better. A fast terminal isn't as fast as no terminal.

------
pacomerh
Is it as fast as Kitty now?, last time I check the fastest one was still Kitty
([https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/](https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/))

~~~
Jenk
Kitty has a better feature set imo, too, but is a shame the author is such an
ass about Windows that he refuses to even contemplate support for it.

~~~
KitDuncan
Why does that make him an ass? It's his project, he can do whatever he likes
with it.

~~~
Jenk
It doesn't, it is his attitude when people ask about it that makes him an ass.

------
DrBazza
I've used alacritty, and then just went back to using konsole. I didn't really
get any feeling it was 'faster'.

Why does every rust project claim to be 'blazing fast'?

~~~
corndoge
On Windows, Alacritty is actually extremely fast compared to anything else
I've tried, including windows terminal, powershell and CMD, from startup time
to keystroke delay. Unfortunately many of the third party terminals for
windows that have normal terminal features are Electron apps and are so slow
they're unusable (looking at you Terminus). On Linux I don't see a difference
between Alacritty and konsole, terminator, rxvt, etc.

~~~
pxc
I've noticed the same thing, and on macOS, too.

Non-free operating systems have a really poor selection of terminal emulator
software, both in terms of feature sets and in terms of performance. They're
usually inflexible (Microsoft's old terminal emulator, like for PowerShell and
CMD by default) or extensible but based on web technologies, and in both
cases, they're slow.

iTerm2 can be made to perform passably, but only by throwing GPU acceleration
at the problem, which doesn't seem to be necessary for popular and banal
terminal emulator choices on Linux, like Gnome Terminal and Konsole.

The performance differences become much more visible if you're a tmux user, in
many cases.

------
joobus
FYI, still doesn't support font ligatures, if you're into that sort of thing:
[https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50)

------
smabie
Last time I checked I remembered encountering absolutely horrendous input
latency with alacrity, does anyone know if this is still the case?

~~~
spanhandler
st with tmux is pretty great. Just about the lowest input latency you're
likely to find on Linux, AFAIK, and tmux means you need few or no patches to
st to have a full-featured term. Not as low-latency as Mac terminal, but then
again I don't know of a Linux terminal emulator that is.

~~~
nickjj
The last time I tried st the input latency was quite a bit more than xterm.
Noticeable enough to feel the difference when opening them side by side and
typing normally. xterm is really as good as it gets if you want a buttery
smooth typing experience.

~~~
mrob
Kitty can match xterm's latency while having better throughput. The only
drawback is the forced anti-aliasing, but that's easily patched out (in
freetype.c, change the last line of get_load_flags() to "return base |
FT_LOAD_MONOCHROME | FT_LOAD_TARGET_MONO;")

------
jedisct1
I've been using Alacritty for a while, but eventually got back to the standard
Terminal.app and iTerm.

The former feels snappier (and is probably GPU-accelerated as well anyway),
looks better and comes out of the box. The later has way more features.

I just tried Alacritty 0.5, and it has some weird artifacts when text color
changes, which happens a lot when the shell highlights commands, or when
editing text.

Anyway, it's great to have options.

~~~
kemayo
For what it's worth, iTerm has been GPU-accelerated since 3.2, when it got a
new Metal rendering engine:
[https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_2_0.changelog](https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_2_0.changelog)

------
francislavoie
Not having smart copy is a complete dealbreaker to me
[https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1919](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1919)

Windows Terminal has smart copy by default now and the UX improvements of it
are a huge difference. I use pantheon-terminal (i.e. the one from
elementaryOS) on my linux environments, and the only reason is because it also
has smart copy.

It means that on all the applications I use, Ctrl+C does _exactly_ what I
expect, all the time. I don't want to have to context-switch when I go to a
terminal and remember "oh yeah, I need to hold shift too" and accidentally
kill the running process like a "tail -f" that I have running for logs on some
server.

I understand it might be technically difficult to implement, but it means I
can't switch to Alacritty without inevitable daily frustration.

~~~
smabie
I mean, with Xorg, just select and middle click. Am I missing something?

~~~
jasonjayr
That's your cut buffer.

Heavy/Traditional Xorg users have enjoyed + gotten used to the multiple
clipboards available. [1]

Users are migrating to Linux from Windows/MacOS and are not used to it; and
asking for changes. (Remember Chrome + FF changing the selection behavior on
the address bar to match windows?) [2] [3]

[1]
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Clipboard](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Clipboard)

[2]
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=26140](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=26140)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22832199](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22832199)

~~~
smabie
I don't know what a cut buffer is is, but middle click copies to primary

clipboard is the Windows style paste. I personally never really use clipboard,
as using primarily is so much easier. I guess there might be using it at the
same time, but I've personally never felt the need for two buffers at the same
time.

~~~
jasonjayr
I'm primarily an urxvt user: select copies & middle pastes. What terminal are
you using that middle click is mapped to copy?

~~~
smabie
Sorry, i meant paste on middle click.

------
ducktective
So if I'm using Ubuntu, I'm supposed to set-up a Rust toolchain and keep it
updated to be able to install Alacritty?

~~~
abrowne
They included a deb until this release :-/

There are packages in the Pop OS PPA[1] I am planning on using. (They haven't
added 0.5 yet.). I won't add the PPA, just download and install the deb.

It looks like this release has been published to crates.io[2], which was a
blocker to getting alacritty packaged in Debian[3], so hopefully soon it will
be added and synced to Ubuntu.

1:
[https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+package...](https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+packages)

2:
[https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/357#issuecomme...](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/357#issuecomment-667449072)

3: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851639](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851639)

~~~
abrowne
Version 0.5 has been added:
[https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+package...](https://launchpad.net/~system76/+archive/ubuntu/pop/+packages?field.name_filter=alacritty&field.status_filter=published&field.series_filter=focal)

------
platz
I've been using urxvt for some reason.. maybe out of simplicity. It's color
range is bad though, though at the same time it's colors are more accurate
than if i run xfce4-terminal, for example.

~~~
pmoriarty
I went from xterm to urxvt (which I used for many years), back to xterm, then
to st to alacritty and finally settled on kitty, which I love.

kitty has TrueColor support, way more features than aclacritty (which seems to
take a more minimalist approach, if I remember right, and this was one of the
main reasons I switched from the latter to the former), and in my experience
has been both extremely fast and extremely stable.

The only thing I really don't like about it is that it seems to copy
continuously to the clipboard when I click and drag over some text, so pieces
of that text end up cluttering my clipboard history (for which I use
parcellite on Linux). The final selection when I finish moving my mouse and
let go of my left mouse button works fine, as usual, so I'm willing to live
with this... though I'd still prefer it not to copy anything to my clipboard
until I've finished clicking and dragging and released my left mouse button.

------
jchook
All we wanted was tabs, but instead we got... tmux copy mode? Even though we
already have to use tmux because... no tabs.

------
BlackLotus89
It's finally usable for me as well [0]

Especially for lower end machines like the pinebook pro it's nixe to have a
smooth scrolling and rendering experience. The only terminal that renderd
without much of a delay on it was st[1] And that I would probably have to
patch [2] to get a great experience out of. (it's already good)

[0]
[https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/128#issuecomme...](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/128#issuecomment-663927477)

[1] [https://st.suckless.org/](https://st.suckless.org/)

[2] [https://st.suckless.org/patches/](https://st.suckless.org/patches/)

Edit: Both terminals kitty and alacritty seem to work now out of the box on my
setup.No environment variablres required :)

~~~
acdw
The one issue I had with st, and it was big enough that I had to switch, was
that it crashes on some emoji. It's actually not even an st issue, it's
upstream in ... some X font library, I think, but that just means that I can't
take my st with me from computer to computer. It sucks, really, because st's
great otherwise and it's not even their fault.

------
jonny383
Been using alacritty on Linux for about a year. After some customisation and
key binding setups for tmux, it's easily the best terminal emulator I have
used on Linux.

Don't know for sure, but it does feel faster and more polished than kitty.

------
japaget
I tried the portable install on 64-bit Windows 10 1909 Professional and it
didn't work. The cursor was stuck in the upper left hand corner and I never
got a command prompt.

------
paedubucher
I still have issues that the font is bigger on my laptop screen than on my
external screen. This is really annoying.

~~~
mklein994
I found that changing my keybinding to start alacritty with this environment
variable set seems to work:

    
    
      WINIT_X11_SCALE_FACTOR=1.0 alacritty
    
    

[https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/commit/93780ef0929e08...](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/commit/93780ef0929e08f3c5212e5451152ecaf1a28813)

------
michaelcampbell
Thank you for putting a "what this is" paragraph in the referenced page.

------
riquito
Kudos, impressive release

