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Comment by mijoharas | Hacker News Reader

Alacritty is simple and fast[0] (it does have mouse support, but no tabs, sessions, or startup scripts as far as I know. Configuration is all via config file.).

Is that the kind of thing that you were looking for?

[0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

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Regarding terminal emulators, I believe that by "fast" people usually mean "low latency" instead of "high throughput". Apparently alacritty has a good performance on thoughtput according its benchmark with vtebench, but it does not provide good latency performance according to [0].

[0] https://danluu.com/term-latency/

I'm not sure how current that article is - in that article they state that the alacritty team had created an issue relating to latency[0] which was closed in favour of a different issue[1] which is still open.

The newer issue[1] appears to state that latency isn't an issue on Wayland as it already has frame scheduling support, but their proposed fix targets X11, MacOS and Windows.

I was quite surprised as I hadn't noticed any latency using alacritty, but I've been on Wayland for some time so that might be the reason.

[0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/673

[1] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3972

I agree, 34ms is unacceptable latency. Let's all use eshell in Emacs instead.

That reference is pretty old at this point, especially considering that some of those terminal emulators were very young projects still. I would search for new results before making a statement about performance.

Doesn't it feel sketchy to run a terminal that isn't even packaged by Debian? I run a few non-packaged things, but I don't want my terminal, or shell, or kernel to be "some code from a some person on github".

Idk man, this is a successful project that's half a decade old[1], has over 40k stars, is wildly popular in eg. the UnixPorn and TWM communities, and is packaged by most other distros; I don't really see any cause for concern ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1]: Dated via the dev's release blog post: https://jwilm.io/blog/announcing-alacritty/

twm the windowmanager?

That's strange. I wonder why debian is lagging behind on packaging it? Alacritty is packaged by my package manager, so I never really thought about it much.

In addition, at some point I had a look, and the former terminal I used to use (termite[0]) deprecated itself in favour of alacritty as well so I can't even switch back (I mean I could, but it's now unmaintained.)

[0] https://github.com/thestinger/termite

I don't see how that is a property of a software. If it isn't in the repos of a distro, it is a property of the distro.

As you got systemd and non systemd distros, Debian is in this a distro w/o alacrity.

No, not being included in Debian reflects poorly on the software. It implies there's something "wrong" with it. Perhaps it's too new, or too arcane, or in some other fashion doesn't live up to the operating system's extremely high quality and security standards.

I don't think this would necessarily be true with other Linux based operating systems (perhaps RHEL), but certainly is true in this case.

OP mentioned good colour support, which alacritty does not have.

How do you mean? I always thought the colours seem fine, and googling this it says it has 24-bit colour support[0] which almost seems excessive for a terminal. Are there some limitations or problems I'm unaware of?

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Colors

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/109

Maybe I'm a bit harsh, but you see a lot of programs require work arounds.

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