Alacritty

Alacritty is a terminal emulator written in Rust that renders with OpenGL and runs on Linux, BSD, macOS and Windows. It follows a deliberate minimalism: rather than reimplementing what other programs already do, it integrates with them, so it has no tabs, splits or GUI settings editor. The FAQ says these are best left to a window manager or a terminal multiplexer such as tmux. It fits users who already have that setup and want a fast terminal underneath it.

Performance is the project's main focus. Throughput is measured with the project's own vtebench tool, and the FAQ notes that latency and frame consistency are harder to quantify and suggests testing with your own workloads. Rendering needs at least OpenGL ES 2.0, and on Windows it needs ConPTY (Windows 10 version 1809 or later). The README rates the software as beta, with some missing features and open bugs, though many people use it daily.

Configuration is a TOML file, alacritty.toml, looked up under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/, ~/.config/alacritty/ and similar paths, or %APPDATA%\alacritty\ on Windows. Alacritty does not create the file for you, and it is documented in man 5 alacritty and on alacritty.org. Changes are reloaded live by default, and an import option can pull in additional config files. On Unix, alacritty msg talks to a running instance over IPC, for example alacritty msg create-window opens another window from the same process.

The main interactive feature is vi mode (Ctrl+Shift+Space). It moves a cursor through the viewport and scrollback with configurable vi motions, makes character, semantic, line or block selections, and starts searches with / and ?. Regular scrollback search uses Ctrl+Shift+F and Ctrl+Shift+B. Hints match visible text with regexes and pass matches to an external program or a built-in action, with the keyboard or the mouse. Clickable URLs and selection expansion are also included. Font ligatures are not supported; the request is still an open issue in the tracker.