Install Alacrity Terminal For Macos Sierra
Alacritty Install
Install Alacrity Terminal For Macos Catalina
Install Alacrity Terminal For Macos Operating System

February 5, 2018

It is also available for MacOS, BSD, and Windows. Another important aspect of Alacritty is that it is open source released under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. This makes it easy for users to use it and see the source code from its page on GitHub. Install Alacritty on Ubuntu. Alacritty is available for various Gnu / Linux distributions. This simple tutorial will show you how to install the fastest terminal emulator Alacritty on Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10 and Linux Mint 20 via PPA. Alacritty Is a cross-platform GPU-accelerated terminal emulator that runs on macOS, Linux, BSD, and Windows. This is free open source software with an emphasis on simplicity and performance.

I’m a huge Vim fan and using it since 2002 (the year I’ve started to learnLinux and how to compile Gentoo kernel). It’s a fundamental part of my life.But lately, I’m very sad about the performance on macOS terminals (iTerm2 andTerminal.app). On Linux, vim is literally flying, but on macOS, Vim renderingis very slow and lagging.

This wasn’t always the case though. Some of the older version of iTerm2’srendering was fast. I know it was fast. But with each macOS update and iTerm2update, it would either get fast or slow. Some versions work decent, some don’t.And I didn’t want to stuck with an older version as well, as the newer versionof iTerm2 always has a lot of bug fixes.

After upgrading to a new machine (iMac Pro), I thought it would be much fasternow that I have a beast under me. But nope :) Things don’t work like that. Thiswas really frustrating. Upon some research, I’ve found my answer.

GPU accelerated terminal

I’m not alone. There are also other people who are not happy with current stateof emulators. Joe Wilm decided to change it and started theproject “Alacritty”.

Alacritty, is a cross-platform, GPUaccelerated terminal emulator written in Rust. It is focused on simplicity andperformance and therefore it’s very opinionated, but at the same time also veryambitious. Time will tell how Alacritty will end up, but I see already that ithas a lot of fans. What makes Alacritty so different from others?

Obviously, GPU accelerated rendering is the biggest selling point (usingOpenGL). However, it’s very opinionated as well:

It aims to be the fastest terminal emulator available everywhere. This isdone mainly by using custom written, fast parsers in Rust with advancedtechniques (such as table-driven parsing and using zero-cost abstractions inRust)
Simplicity is one of the core values of Alacritty. This means there is no GUIto change the configuration, no pane/window handling (no tabs orvertical/horizontal splits), no scrollback, etc.. The list goes on. Instead,one has to use something like Tmux to include all these features. Thissurprisingly works really good. However, there is an open PR that implementsscrollback, so things canchange regarding the focus towards simplicity.
Appearance is another important part of Alacritty. One difference I could seeis that with my new iMac Pro, the display supports the P3 color gamut. iTerm2uses sRGB, whereas Alacritty uses the system color profile. The colors aremuch more vibrant in Alacritty.
Alacritty is cross-platform. It aims a support for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

The author wrote a blog post that goes over these in more detail. Worth readingit: Announcing Alacritty

Install Alacrity Terminal For Macos Sierra

Install Alacritty

There are no binaries to install, from the author’s words:

Precompiled binaries will eventually be made available on supportedplatforms. This is minimally blocked in a stable config format. For now,Alacritty must be built from source.

So how do you build from the source? This is all written in theREADME.mdfile. I didn’t find the README.md very useful as the steps for macOS is allover the place. Here is a recap for you:

First, you need Rust to compile and build Alacritty. The easiest way toinstall rust is to to use the official toolchain installerrustup.rs. Execute the following line to install rust:

(note: Kudos to the Rust team to great an easy to install experience for rusttoolchain, but I have to say that Go’s native macOS dmg installer feels moresecure)

All rust related binaries will be installed to .cargo/bin. Make sure to addit to your PATH:

Finally, make sure you have the right Rust compiler installed:

And then git clone Alacritty and start compiling the macOS app:

Once this is finished, you’ll get a ready to use Alacritty.app file. Copy itto /Applications and you’re done!:

But, don’t start Alacritty yet. There are couples of configuration steps worthtalking. Let’s do them.

Configure Alacritty

There is a ready to use configuration file in Alacritty for macOS. Copy it tothe configuration folder of Alacritty (be sure to be inside the git repo):

Now when you start Alacritty, it should start with this base configuration.We’re not finished yet as I’ve customized it a little bit for my need. What arethese?

First I’m using the SF Mono fonts:

I don’t like pure black background because it hurt my eyes. I, therefore, use aslightly less muted background. I also like a red cursor block:

I don’t want to see my cursor when I use the terminal, so I disable showing thecursor it with:

My shell is set to zsh. We have to tell Alacritty explicitly which shell weuse:

Lastly, I don’t use cmd+w to close a window (we’re going to use it forsomething else). Therefore I deleted the following line from key_bindings:

Those are the main parts in my configuration. I’m still discovering new thingsand updating my alacritty.yml file from time to time. Be sure to follow mydotfiles repo to see the latest changes:https://github.com/fatih/dotfiles/blob/master/alacritty.yml

We’re still not finished though. The key_bindings field is interesting thatit allows us to capture any shortcut and execute certain commands. We can evenwrite escape sequences for certain shortcuts. This is very powerful because itallows us to customize Alacritty even further if used with tmux.

Make Alacritty feel like iTerm2

I like iTerm2 and using heavily the split/verticalpanes, tabs, resizing the panes etc.. features of it. It’s heavily customizedfor my needs. As I said, Alacritty doesn’t support any of the bells andwhistles. But it can be configured to send escape sequences (in hex code) foryour custom shortcuts.

Before we dive into this, note that I use tmuxfor managing my views. tmux is very powerful, so you can do a lot of thingswith it. You can see my tmux configuration file in my dotfiles repo:tmux.conf

All terminal multiplexers/applications have their own terminology. In tmux this is:

session: a collection of terminals that tmux handles. Each session has one more window
windows: a window occupies the entire screen. It can be split into rectangular panes
panes: the smallest unit in a window. One or multiple panes

This is kinda the same in iTerm2, except windows is called tabs. I’m usingtabs and panes heavily in iTerm2 with shortcuts (no mouse is used), such as :

create/close a new tab
create vertical and horizontal pane
increase/decrease size of panes
jump between tabs directly
move between panes easily

I can do all these actions with tmux as well. But not with the same shortcuts.For example, if I want to open a new vertical pane, I have to type the following:

This means, you first press ctrl and f together, and then press v. Forhorizontal split, I use the following:

Same, for the steps above I have to use these shortcuts in tmux (I’ve manuallychanged some of them to my own liking):

create a tab: ctrl-f c
close a tab: ctrl-f &
close a pane: ctrl-f x (this also closes the tab if there is a single pane)
crea

Install Alacritty Terminal For Macos