Performance is never a bad thing, even if I don't always need my terminal emulator to be able to handle large amounts of text, there is nothing wrong with having a light weight high performance (eventually cross platform, hopefully) modern terminal emulator. I read a while back that implementing the same in iterm2 (a popular macOS only terminal emulator) is challenging due to past design decisions [0]. Certainly in a time where hyper terminal[1] (based on electron) exists, I see no downside to having the option of Alacritty.
Depends on your priorities and what you are willing to sacrifice for it. High bandwidth terminal emulators will cost CPU and battery life. I'd opt for longer battery life.
I agree! currently I run windows as my main OS precisely due to inferior battery life on Linux. I only use Alacritty in minimal Linux VMs when they are not running headless(as pseudo containers, I will be migrating fully to Linux + Docker soon). I normally only work with the VMs while plugged-in and because Alacritty is not available for windows yet, have not used it much on battery therefore I am not in a position to say anything about the battery impact. One thing I have noticed is that it is noticeably slower to start on the same VM as compared to XTerm but the VIM experience was better in Alacritty.
Sorry I did not word that properly, I did not meant to sound aggressive, what I meant to say was that the high performance characteristic is nice to have even if there is little use for it. It is a breath of fresh air in the modern trend of building everything on electron. Having the option for a x-platform terminal emulator with a modern code base is an added bonus! One thing that I forgot to mention was that I particularly love Joe's approach to its development, (similar to suck less approach) changes and features are added only if they do not negatively impact performance (in a significant way) and if you do not want to enable them they can be disabled during build, completely removing them form the compiled program.
Also vim performance is really great inside VMs in Alacritty on my 6th gen core i5 laptop :)
