Update:
Please check the updated version of this article in the link given below:
Alacritty is a cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator. It is an OpenGL terminal emulator written in Rust Programming language. Thanks to the OpenGL renderer and the high throughput parser, Alacritty is incredibly fast and extremely lightweight Terminal emulator in existence. Since it has been developed to focus only on simplicity and performance in mind, Alacritty Terminal emulator doesn't include many fancy features like tabs and spilts that you use in other Terminal emulators, for example Terminology. It supports major operating systems, including Linux, BSD, Mac OS, and Windows.
Why yet another Terminal emulator?
The developer of Alacritty says that the idea to develop this terminal emulator was born out of the frustration while using Vim inside Tmux sessions. After trying different Terminals, he has felt none of them were fast enough as he expected. Even though urxvt and st gave good experiences, he says that the major downside of such terminal emulators is difficulty of configuration and inability to run on non-X11 platforms. So he decided to develop his own to address the issues he faced with other Terminal emulators.
Install Alacritty Terminal emulator On Linux
Alacritty has been packaged for many popular Linux operating systems.
On Arch Linux and its variants, install Alacritty using pacman like below.
$ sudo pacman -S alacritty
On Fedora:
$ sudo dnf copr enable pschyska/alacritty $ sudo dnf install alacritty
On Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Linux Mint:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mmstick76/alacritty
$ sudo apt install alacritty
On openSUSE Tumbleweed:
$ sudo zypper in alacritty
On NixOS:
$ nix-env -iA nixos.alacritty
Precompiled binaries are also available in the GitHub releases page. Download and install them depends on the Linux version you use.
Alacritty will work fine out of the box. No additional setup or configuration is needed! Just install it and start using it in no time.
Here is Alacritty in action in my Ubuntu 18.04 LTS desktop.
Alacritty Terminal Emulator
The developer of any project will always claim his/her project is good, so I didn't believe when I read about Alacritty. But, I was wrong! After using it for couple days, I realized that Alacritty is indeed a fastest Terminal emulator ever I have used.
