Alacritty notes

[khem]

I have started to use alacritty instead of iterm2 on my Mac machines. Its easy to install

brew install  --cask alacrity
brew install font-fira-code-nerd-font font-hack-nerd-font 

The themes and config is stored in .config/alacritty/alacritty.toml

I like to use different themes for night and day colors, luckily there is a whole git repo containing all the themes

GitHub - alacritty/alacritty-theme: Collection of Alacritty color schemes

Follow the install instructions from README to clone it into .config repo.

Here is my alacritty.toml

import = [
    "~/.config/alacritty/themes/themes/base16_default_dark.toml"
]

[colors]
draw_bold_text_with_bright_colors = true

[font]
size = 12.0
normal = { family = "FiraCode Nerd Font Mono", style = "Retina" }
#normal = { family = "JetBrainsMono Nerd Font", style = "Light" }
italic = { family = "Hack Nerd Font" }
offset = { x = 0, y = 1 }

[cursor]
style = "Block"
unfocused_hollow = true

You might not like the font rendering as alacritty seems to ignore thin strokes on MacOS

So help it by

defaults write org.alacritty AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

if you do not like the crispness it will create for alacritty you can reset it

defaults delete org.alacritty AppleFontSmoothing

[cbrake]

I just tried Alacritty on Linux and think I’ll run with this going forward. I had switched from Konsole to Kitty due to some rendering issues with Yazzi. However, several issues in Kitty:

• does not support zoom which I occasionally miss.
• Espanso does not work properly – substitutes ‘;’ for ‘:’ which I use extensively in my time tracking system.

Excited to discover Alacritty has zoom (Ctrl +/-), and Espanso works properly. Defaults seem good enough for me. Also seems a bit faster to start.

Because I use Zellij, the features I need in the terminal are minimal. Alacritty seems to fit the bill perfectly.

Now I just need to get zsh going and perhaps I’ll be caught up with @khem

[cbrake]

Alacritty has been crashing for me lately – mostly while running Helix inside Zellij, but just crashed while running SIOT tests. This is the workstation still running X, so may be something to do with that. Anyway, back to Kitty for coding for now – nice to have options …

[khem]

thats sad, I am sure you updated arch to latest. It should work well in X too. Having said that I usually run it on kwin+wayland

[cbrake]

yes, latest Arch here. Tried Wayland again, and only getting 1024x768 resolution on 4K monitors. Not sure what is wrong. Nvidia RTX 3050 card, nvidia-open driver package. Probably need to stay in X anyway for a bit with KiCad as it still relies on wxWidgets.

[khem]

wxWidget app can run over xwayland without issues I think. I am not suing nouveau driver but the binary driver from Nvidia, latest version works ok with wayland.

[cbrake]

There are now 3 options for nvidia: nouveau, nvidia, and nvidia-open. According to Arch wiki, Nvidia recommends nvidia-open for newer cards, but maybe I should try nvidia.

[khem]

I upgraded to MacOS 15 ( Sequoia ) and alacritty stopped working especially access to local network was disallowed. It was working fine using Terminal.app or Wezterm. It seems it was flagged by OS and quarantined. so do this

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Alacritty.app

Then it restores to work. Phew !

[khem]

And annoyingly ssh client starts to disconnect every minute with MacOS 15, some folks on communities suggested to disable firewall

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255761702?sortBy=rank&page=2
https://community.ui.com/questions/Entire-network-halts-crashes-every-minute/0c0625b0-5658-4cb2-b95c-ddb17c6920a2

but that may not be possible if computer is not managed by you. One solution I found was to install newer version of OpenSSH from brew

original ssh

ssh -V
OpenSSH_9.8p1, LibreSSL 3.3.6

brew install openssh
ssh -V

OpenSSH_9.9p1, OpenSSL 3.3.2 3 Sep 2024

[cbrake]

Apple is serious about security!

I like the idea that no random app can access the network – that makes sense.

However, it is a tradeoff between security and letting you get something done.

I find a stock Linux system is secure enough for me. No magic stuff like Windows and MacOS where it is policing stuff, but the foundations of Linux are solid, which eliminates the need for a lot of this stuff.

Perhaps depends on the user some too …

[khem]

even new ssh bails out intermittently with

ssh_dispatch_run_fatal: Connection to <IP_ADDRESS> port XXXX: message authentication code incorrect

so I tried wezTerm and it worked, now I tried kitty and it works ok too, default OSX terminal app works. So it seems alacritty alone is having this issue.