Alacritty

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Alacritty is focused on simplicity and performance. The performance goal means it should be faster than any other terminal emulator available. The simplicity goal means that it doesn't have features such as tabs or splits (which can be better provided by a window manager or terminal multiplexer) nor niceties like a GUI config editor.^[1]

Alacritty is build on Rust (programming language) and is GPU accelerated.^[2]

USE fags

USE flags for x11-terms/alacritty GPU-accelerated terminal emulator

`+X`	Add support for X11
`debug`	Enable extra debug codepaths, like asserts and extra output. If you want to get meaningful backtraces see https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Quality_Assurance/Backtraces
`wayland`	Enable dev-libs/wayland backend

Data provided by the Gentoo Package Database · Last update: 2025-02-17 11:13 More information about USE flags

Installation

Emerge

Install x11-terms/alacritty:

root #emerge --ask x11-terms/alacritty

Configuration

There is a default `alacritty.yml`, `alacritty_macos.yml` and `alacritty_windows.yml` at the git repository root for Linux, macOS and Windows respectively.

Alacritty looks for the configuration file at the following paths:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.yml
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.yml
$HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml
$HOME/.alacritty.yml

If none of these paths are found then $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.yml is created once alacritty is first run. On most systems this often defaults to $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml.

Default configuration file is also installed into /usr/share/doc/alacritty-<version>/

Many configuration options will take effect immediately upon saving changes to the config file. The only exception is the `font` and `dimensions` sections which requires Alacritty to be restarted. For further explanation of the config file, please consult the comments in the default config file.

Tips and tricks

Troubleshooting

Font is too small or big

Changing `font` variable in `font` does not affect alacritty if killed and invoked.
Changing `background` in colors, primary does affect alacritty in real-time == Possible bug with text size?

References

https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/blob/master/README.md - ReadME for this package.
https://jwilm.io/blog/announcing-alacritty/ - Announcing Alacritty, a GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator.
https://air.mozilla.org/rust-meetup-january-2017/ - A short talk about Alacritty at the Rust Meetup January 2017 (starts at 57:00).