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.
The CLI offers 50+ Themes to choose from, an option to create your alacritty.yml config file with a simple, easy and intuitive user experience. It is using yaml and inquirer npm packages for parsing the config yml and giving a list of themes to choose from the terminal respectively. This simple tutorial shows how to install the fastest terminal emulator, Alacritty, in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, Linux Mint 20 via PPA. Alacritty is a cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator works on macOS, Linux, BSD, and Windows. It’s free and open-source software that strongly focus on simplicity and performance.
Install Alacritty Manjaro
Further information
Alacritty can be installed using package managers on Linux, BSD, macOS and Windows. To install Alacritty on Linux, run the following commands depending on your distribution. Note that some distributions already include Alacritty binaries in their repository. If not you can run the below commands to install. Brew cask install alacritty. Brew install nushell. Alacritty is fast. Like, really fast. This is very promising. I installed on Mac OS and the colors in the terminal flash when I type which is an unfortunate problem. NuShell open vs bat (and cat) open is a multi-purpose nushell builtin.
- 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 there are instructions to compile Alacritty from source.
For the manual installation, please first read the prerequisites section, then find the instructions for your OS, and finally go through the building and configuration steps.
Arch Linux
Debian/Ubuntu
Using cargo deb, you can create and install a deb file.
openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux
Void Linux
FreeBSD
Manual Installation
Prerequisites
- Alacritty requires the most recent stable Rust compiler; it can be installed with
rustup.
Installing Rust compiler with rustup
Install
rustup.rs.Clone the source code:
Make sure you have the right Rust compiler installed. Run
Debian/Ubuntu
You can build alacritty using cargo deb and use your system's package manager to maintain the application using the instructions above.
If you'd still like to build a local version manually, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's an apt command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
Alacritty Mac
Arch Linux
On Arch Linux, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a pacman command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
Fedora
On Fedora, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a dnf command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
CentOS/RHEL 7
On CentOS/RHEL 7, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a yum command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
openSUSE
On openSUSE, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a zypper command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
Slackware
Compiles out of the box for 14.2 For copy & paste support (middle mouse button) you need to install xclip https://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/misc/xclip/?search=xclip
Void Linux
On Void Linux, install following packages before compiling Alacritty:
FreeBSD
On FreeBSD, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a pkg command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
OpenBSD
Alacritty builds on OpenBSD 6.3 almost out-of-the-box if Rust and Xenocara are installed. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
Solus
On Solus, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a eopkg command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
NixOS/Nixpkgs
The following command can be used to get a shell with all development dependencies on NixOS.
Gentoo
On Gentoo, there's a portage overlay available. Make sure layman is installed and run:
Then, add x11-terms/alacritty ** to /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords and emerge alacritty:
It might be handy to mask all other packages provided in the slyfox overlay by adding */*::slyfox to /etc/portage/package.mask and adding x11-terms/alacritty::slyfox to /etc/portage/package.unmask.
Cargo
If you have a rust toolchain setup you can install Alacritty via cargo:
Note that you still need to download system build dependencies via your package manager as mentioned above. The binary alacritty will be placed into $HOME/.cargo/bin. Make sure it is in your path (default if you use rustup).
Other
If you build Alacritty on another distribution, we would love some help filling in this section of the README.
Building
BEFORE YOU RUN IT: Install the config file as described below; otherwise, many things (such as arrow keys) will not work.
Linux
Once all the prerequisites are installed, compiling Alacritty should be easy:
If all goes well, this should place a binary at target/release/alacritty.
Desktop Entry
Many linux distributions support desktop entries for adding applications to system menus. To install the desktop entry for Alacritty, run
MacOS
To build an application for macOS, run
Manual Page
Installing the manual page requires the additional dependency gzip. To install the manual page, run
Shell completions
To get automatic completions for alacritty's flags and arguments you can install the provided shell completions.
Zsh
To install the completions for zsh, you can place the alacritty-completions.zsh as _alacritty in any directory referenced by $fpath.
If you do not already have such a directory registered through your ~/.zshrc, you can add one like this:
Then copy the completion file to this directory:
Bash
To install the completions for bash, you can source the alacritty-completions.bash in your ~/.bashrc file.
If you do not plan to delete the source folder of alacritty, you can run
Otherwise you can copy it to the ~/.bash_completion folder and source it from there:
Fish
To install the completions for fish, run
Terminfo
The terminfo database contains entries describing the terminal emulator's capabilities. Programs need these in order to function properly.
Alacritty should work with the standard xterm-256color definition, but to allow programs to make best use of alacritty's capabilities, use its own terminfo definition instead.
Unless the user has set the TERM environment variable in the alacritty configuration, the alacritty terminfo definition will be used if it has been installed. If not, then xterm-256color is used instead.
To install alacritty's terminfo entry globally:
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:
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.yml$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.yml$HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml$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
iTerm2andTerminal.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:
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.