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Install Alacritty

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. And it features Vi mode, search, Vi search etc.

Alacritty Windows 10

Chocolatey is software management automation for Windows that wraps installers, executables, zips, and scripts into compiled packages. Chocolatey integrates w/SCCM, Puppet, Chef, etc. Chocolatey is trusted by businesses to manage software deployments. Install Alacritty on Mac OS. I’m on Mac, so this install guide is Mac-centric, but see the Alacritty repo for more installation instructions. Since Alacritty is a GUI app (icon in the Applications directory), in Homebrew-land this means it’s a 'cask', and has to be installed with the -cask flag.

To install the software, there’s a PPA repository contains the latest packages for Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 20.10. Also an old version is available for Ubuntu 18.04.

1. Open terminal from your system application launcher. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:

Type user password (no asterisk feedback) for sudo prompts and hit Enter to continue.

2. While adding the PPA will also automatically refresh system package cache, run apt command to install the terminal emulator:

Once installed, either open it either from system application launcher or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard.

Uninstall Alacritty:

To remove the terminal emulator, run command:

To remove the Ubuntu PPA, either run command in terminal:

or open Software & Updates and remove the repository line under Other Software tab.

Install Alacritty

Recently stumbled on this comment from lobste.rs. I have heard of Alacritty before but never had a chance to try it out. This time I have decided to at least check it out.

Install Alacritty Mac

What is Alacritty?

Alacritty claims to be a really fast terminal emulator. It has a unique feature according to its description:

Alacritty is the fastest terminal emulator in existence. Using the GPU for rendering enables optimizations that simply aren’t possible in other emulators.

I used to use rxvt-unicode back in Arch Linux and have found it to be very fast considering its small amount of features (which seems to be another advantage of Alacritty). I then switched to iTerm2 when I moved to MacOS.

Installation of Alacritty

Installation is very simple. All I needed to do was install Rust using rustup, clone the repository (first few steps can also be found here), and follow the link here. I always forget about Github’s wiki and missed the documentation about “MacOS application bundle”. I originally did a cp target/release/alacritty /usr/local/bin before finding the wiki.

After installation the configuration can be found at $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml (one of the paths where Alacritty searches for the configuration).

Issues/Missing Features

I really like Alacritty and while it is fast, it does still need some features and fixes. It sacrificed features over speed. While I like that it has lesser features compared to most terminal emulators, it may have went beyond in leaving its features behind. One comment from /r/programming says this:

Install Alacritty Ubuntu 20.04

Comment from discussion Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust.

Here are some features that I find might be useful for me and luckily there are already issues on Github to implement these features (these are also MacOS specific):

  1. I use emacs mode in my shell and commonly use combinations such as alt + b (to move a word back) or alt + . (to insert last argument from previous command). iTerm2 has an option to have the “Left option” key act as “+esc”. Can’t entirely remember what “+esc” is although it allows me to use the same key combinations similar to Linux with the alt key.

    Alacritty doesn’t have this (yet) although a workaround is to specify the combinations and provide the characters it would “invoke”. An example for alt + b and alt + f would be these:

  2. Currently, Alacritty doesn’t have support for full screen. For iTerm2 specifically, it has support for non-native full screen in MacOS. This occupies the whole screen and sits on top of the other applications (unlike the green expand button which seems to occupy a whole other space).

  3. Currently when running the MacOS application bundle through either spotlight or Alfred, only a single instance of Alacritty is allowed. I usually run tmux and vim in separate windows (or tabs in iTerm2). It would be nice if Alacritty supports this.

  4. It’s a bit difficult to open links from Alacritty. In iTerm2, you could do a combination of alt + command + mouse left click to open a link in the default browser. Back in rxvt-unicode, Arch Linux has a documentation on having Clickable URLs.

While Alacritty is still in its early version:

Alacritty Download

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.

I’m still happy that these features are planned to be implemented. I haven’t used Alacritty really long yet. I might go back to iTerm2 but for now I will probably still be using Alacritty. The missing features I can live without.