Alacritty Terminal Version 0.3.0 Release - undeadleech
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undeadleech
I'm one of the Alacritty maintainers and Version 0.3.0 has just been released,
since this is a slightly bigger release I've decided to write up what has
changed for people who haven't been following the project.

If you have any questions, please let me know. I'm happy to answer all of
them.

The source of the project can be found here:
[https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty](https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty)

~~~
nextos
I've used Alacritty quite often, and I particularly like font and color
rendering. It does respect my Xdefaults, whereas XTerm or URxvt don't. It
simply looks much better.

Now, playing a bit of devils advocate, why shall I abandon either of those in
favour of Alacritty? XTerm, in particular, has much lower memory usage and
significantly lower latency.

~~~
undeadleech
If you want the lowest possible memory usage, Alacritty will likely never be
for you. Initializing the OpenGL drivers alone ramps up the memory usage to
more than what some other terminal emulators operate at, making it impossible
for Alacritty to match that.

However, there are other advantages that I personally am really fond of (after
all I myself joined the project long after it was started).

For many the incredible throughput is probably a big plus. And I have to admit
it's just fun to play around with. Using ascii to play videos at almost HD
quality.

But the reason why I use it myself is much more subtle, it's mainly about the
little things. So it's hard to put a finger on 'the one thing' why I enjoy it.

It has sane defaults and is much simpler to configure than something like
URxvt. It is lighter than VTE and doesn't pull in as many dependencies. It has
all the right features that I value which is often much more a preference than
something easily objectifyable. It's also easy for me to hack on because even
before I joined upstream was very cooperative.

In general I think it really depends on what you value so my personal opinion
might be of little value to you or anyone else. So really the only way I see
to tell if you are a fan of it or not is to just give it a shot.

~~~
nextos
Thanks for the detailed writeup! You are certainly right with regards to
memory usage and ease of configuration. Keep up the good work.

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jperras
I really do love what Alacritty is doing. I've been using it as my principal
TTY for a few weeks now, and it has been a joy to use.

Thank you for all the hard work. It might go unsaid sometimes, but it is not
unnoticed!

~~~
undeadleech
> Thank you for all the hard work. It might go unsaid sometimes, but it is not
> unnoticed!

Thanks for going out of your way to say that! It's incredibly encouraging to
see people enjoy Alacritty and hopefully that will drive many others to join
and make it even better than it is now!

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opk
I've been keeping an eye on alacritty and sort of expect to switch at some
point, especially if I begin using Wayland. I've got urxvt configured the way
I like it but it can be annoying that default packaged builds are often
configured for 88 rather than 256 colours. At the moment, I'd miss the search
plugin for searching the scrollback buffer (though I'd prefer if it'd just let
me use less) and the single process daemon mode of urxvt.

~~~
undeadleech
A search feature is definitely planned and I feel like that would be a great
addition to Alacritty.

Daemon mode has also been proposed, however there's only limited advantages
Alacritty would gain from that. However it does seem like it's necessary to
get proper support for macOS for example, so it will likely come too.

