speedyGonzales / alacritty

A cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator

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, Linux, and Windows.

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 are available from the GitHub releases page.

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

openSUSE Tumbleweed

zypper in alacritty

Void Linux

xbps-install alacritty

Gentoo Linux

emerge x11-terms/alacritty

Mageia 7+

urpmi alacritty

FreeBSD

pkg install alacritty

NixOS

nix-env -iA nixos.alacritty

Solus

eopkg install alacritty

macOS

brew cask install alacritty

Once the cask is installed, it is recommended to setup the manual page, shell completions, and terminfo definitions.

Windows

Via Scoop

scoop bucket add extras
scoop install alacritty

Other

Prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows can be downloaded from the GitHub releases page.

To work properly on Windows, Alacritty requires winpty to emulate UNIX's PTY API. The agent is a single binary (winpty-agent.exe) which must be in the same directory as the Alacritty executable and is available through the GitHub releases page.

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 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.

Windows

On Windows the config file is located at:

%APPDATA%\alacritty\alacritty.yml

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.

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.