Alacritty notes

khem · June 14, 2024, 12:30am

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

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 · June 21, 2024, 9:16pm

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