A Look At Alacritty The OpenGL Powered Terminal Application

There are more terminal applications for Linux systems than you can shake a stick at… And frankly, most of them are like choosing what socks to wear; very little difference, save maybe for some special purposes, like thermal socks, or tiling terminals…But, every once and a while I come across one that does things a little differently, and makes me curious to check it out further; such as Alacritty.

Right off the hop something to mention about Alacritty is that this terminal application is GPU powered, using OpenGL; which gives it a much smoother and faster appearance. Does this make it install your software faster? No…but it does look and feel very nice, for what it is. However, this isn’t the only feature of the application; other such features include:

  • Vi mode – Allows moving around Alacritty and scrollback using the keyboard with similar cursor motions to the famous text editor Vim, as well as text selection keybinds.
  • Search – Alacritty allows for searching for text within the scrollback buffer. This is accomplished using either Vi style searching or ‘normal’ searching, depending on preference for keybinds, however Vi searching allows for more free movement through the buffer.
  • Terminal Hints – Terminal hints allows easier interacting with visible text when not in Vi mode. Alacritty has various built-in actions that can be performed when Alacritty autodetects various text elements, and can also feed the texts into external applications. Hints are also able to be triggered via mouse actions by simply clicking on the text.
  • Selection expansion – Text selection can be expanded by holding CTRL, double clicking, and triple clicking, for manual, semantic, and whole line selections respectively.
  • URL opening with mouse – This is self explanatory, you can click links to open them.

Alacritty has build instructions for Linux/BSD, a .dmg file installer for MacOS, and installer versions and portable versions for Windows; and is also available via the Snap store on Linux systems that utilize Snaps.

ADVERTISEMENT

However, some features that other terminal applications utilize that are of interest to some users are notably missing from Alacritty, one such example being tiling. Though the feature has been suggested, the developer of Alacritty has stated that there is, “no way such a feature is making it into Alacritty,” and “there are plenty of terminal emulators to choose from that offer this feature.” Alacritty is designed to be simple, fast, and efficient, and does not incorporate some of the flashier or more complex features people may be accustomed to.

Final thoughts

Alacritty is really nice if you want a straightforward, simple, fast, and no frills terminal application; I could see it being a favourite for a great many users. It doesn’t personally fit my workflow in how I like to use terminal windows, but if you are not someone interested in a thousand and one features, only need a single window per-instance, and / or you enjoy keyboard navigation much like with Vi/Vim, Alacritty may be worth looking at.

Now you: What terminal do you use, and why? Let us know in the comments

Summary

A Look At Alacritty The OpenGL Powered Terminal Application

Article Name

A Look At Alacritty The OpenGL Powered Terminal Application

Description

A review of the OpenGL powered terminal application Alacritty.

Author

Mike Turcotte-McCusker

Publisher

Ghacks.org

Logo

Advertisement

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Xbox Insiders app displays a rating to indicate how games will perform on your computer

Image
Can you run it? Gamers may recognize the phrase, it is the tag line of a popular benchmarking service that determines whether your computer can run a game or not. It’s actually a pretty terrible way to judge the performance of your system, but things like these have a cult/meme status. Now, if you are curious whether your PC can handle a game, there is a way you can get an idea. The Xbox app now displays a rating to indicate how the games will perform on your computer. I tried this on a Windows 10 machine with the regular Xbox app, it does not have the rating system. You will need to be using the Xbox Insiders app on your system to get the new feature. The Xbox app has been getting new features steadily, Microsoft recently added an option in the app that allows you to install games to any folder. ADVERTISEMENT Xbox Insiders app displays a rating to indicate how games will perform on your computer Search for a game, and visit its listing page. You will see a banner that displays
Read more

Latest Ventoy includes VentoyPlugson, a GUI configuration tool

Image
Ventoy 1.0.62, the latest version of the popular open source tool to create bootable USB devices using disk images such as ISO, includes a new tool called VentoyPlugson. VentoyPlugson gives Ventoy users a graphical user interface to configure the tool. Up until now, Ventoy users could only configure the application through the ventoy.json file directly; this option is not going away, and users can even mix and match both options, e.g. by using VentoyPlugson to create a ventoy.json file and then editing the file manually to tweak it further, The latest release version of Ventoy includes the tool in the zip archive. Windows users need to extract the archive that they download from the official repository and run VentoyPlugson.exe afterwards. ADVERTISEMENT It displays a small GUI. Select the Ventoy USB device and then the Start button; this should open the configuration page in the default browser. If that does not work, use the Link button instead. There is also a refresh button i
Read more

Progressive Web Apps for Firefox Extension

Image
Progressive Web Apps for Firefox is a browser extension for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser and a command line utility to install, manage and use Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in Firefox. Mozilla’s Firefox web browser supports many of the APIs that PWAs use, but Mozilla decided some time ago to remove installation options from Firefox. Most Chromium-based browsers support installing PWAs directly from within. Installation on desktop systems adds these applications to the Start Menu for quick access, and these apps launch in their own dedicated window. Progressive Web Apps for Firefox introduces a number of features to Firefox that users of the browser may find useful. Some functionality may even be useful to users who don’t use PWAs. ADVERTISEMENT PWAs that are installed in Firefox through the extension benefit from a number of extra features. One of the most interesting features of the extension is that PWAs are run in an isolated Firefox extension that may use multiple profiles to s
Read more