Leaving Cmder for Alacritty (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Cmder for Alacritty (2020)

justjensen.co

14 pointsindigodaddy14 comments

I switched from Cmder to Windows Terminal after using the former exclusively for years. I really like that Cmder comes with Unix tools out of the box, but Windows Terminal is a better terminal IMO since it only does a few things, but it does them well. SSH, vim, tmux, and other complex terminal programs mostly just work. It's also much more straight forward to add new custom shells/profiles than with Cmder.

One annoyance I do have with Windows Terminal is that there isn't a nice way to open up an admin terminal. I usually just have to right click it and open as admin (could also do a shortcut, but that's basically the same thing). Not sure if it is possible, but I would especially love to have admin and non-admin tabs in the same window.

If you pin it to start menu, and have an Admin console setup via the settings it will appear in the Start menu jump list to open as admin. Though doing it this way you do get the flicker as the non admin terminal spawns the admin terminal.

The admin terminal story on Terminal was a bit of a mess last time I looked, I think for security reasons. Has anything changed?

"Loading ... took 2323ms". Over two seconds of loading for each terminal seems like a lot, but I'm guessing YMMV.

I switched to the newer Windows Terminal from the store. It's tolerable, much more so than ConEmu ever was.

Also, every day I'm thankful I don't have some counter-productive IT team preventing me from doing my job effectively.

Windows Terminal is the most tmux friendly terminal for Windows, IMO.

And their roadmap looks very nice: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/doc/terminal...

I recently tried out Windows Terminal. Honestly, its about as fast as urxvt was when I used to run Linux as a desktop fulltime, and then switched to mintty (via msys2) as a replacement when I came back to Windows after being away for 20 years.

Also, the ability to run shaders is surprisingly interesting, something it shares with Alacritty and Secret Geometry's Cathode (RIP).

For the Linux users, any compelling case for alacritty (or similar style renders)? I'm quite happy with termite, fast startup, handles fonts well, etc. I've use urxvt in the past too, that that was a little trickier with fonts and some settings. Can't say I've ever wanted my display to be faster, but maybe I'm missing a use case?

It's GPU accelerated and fast, scrolling is extremely smooth and it looks better. It's also Wayland-native if that matters to you. I use it with Sway as a tiling manager, it's perfect.

Smooth because of the faster drawing you mean? termite at least scrolls by pixels (not lines) and seems smooth enough to me. But maybe for something like fast compiling output? I did try alacritty some time ago, but didn't really notice a difference. Is there particular things you can see the difference in?

I couldn't tell you about a particular instance, though I think just when massive amounts of output scroll by it never lags, even dumping output from dd and such, I can't compare to Termite, I also don't care about tabs and prefer leaving that to a WM.

A few years ago I had a nice wsl1 setup on a laptop with vcXsrv for X and I created a PS script/desktop shortcut that started vcXsrv, then spawned a wsl that called Termite. I love Termite.. kinda urxvt’ish but much prettier/easier setup/config/customization. That terminal/setup was super super fast and very nice

Same, used a few different until I found termite and it did everything I sometimes struggled to get working on the other ones, with minimal config.

Don't use Alacritty, but using Kitty for a few years now I can attest that a nice GPU acclerated terminal is quite nice

i'm really liking kitty.

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