Alacritty

Alacritty is a modern, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator that prioritizes performance through OpenGL rendering. Unlike traditional terminal emulators, Alacritty focuses on doing one thing exceptionally well: providing a fast, responsive terminal experience by leveraging hardware acceleration. This approach allows it to consistently outperform other terminals in throughput benchmarks while maintaining low latency and high frame consistency.

The terminal follows a philosophy of integration rather than reimplementation, meaning it doesn't include built-in features like tabs or splits, instead encouraging users to rely on window managers or terminal multiplexers like tmux for such functionality. This design choice keeps Alacritty lightweight while allowing for extensive configuration through its TOML-based config system. Despite being in beta, it's already widely adopted as a daily driver by developers who prioritize speed and minimalism.

Alacritty is cross-platform, supporting BSD, Linux, macOS, and Windows, with the main requirement being OpenGL ES 2.0 support. It's ideal for power users, developers, and anyone who spends significant time in the terminal and values performance over built-in convenience features. The project maintains active development and provides precompiled binaries for easy installation across all supported platforms.

Installation

# via GitHub Releases
Download prebuilt binaries from GitHub releases page

# via Package Manager
Various package managers available on Linux, BSD, macOS and Windows

# via Manual Installation
See INSTALL.md for detailed platform-specific instructions