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.

[cbrake]

After running Ghostty for some months, I decided to return to Alacritty. The main reason is startup time. I assign a keyboard shortcut to start my terminal, and Alacritty is nearly instant, whereas Ghostty takes 3-5 seconds. The difference may be because Ghostty uses GTK where Alacritty writes directly to the GPU.

Alacritty also feels slightly faster, but this is subjective.

The following removes the window decoration in Alacritty, which I liked in Ghostty.:

[cbrake@ceres ~]$ more .config/alacritty/alacritty.toml
[window]

decorations = "None"

[mjago]

3-5 seconds is a surprise to me. I have been using Ghostty for 3 months or so on two dev machines and startup is well within a second. My main attraction to Ghostty is the speed with which it can handle several panes of real-time structured debug info (tons and tons of formatting to improve visual impact), and shortcut configuration possibilities. I also love that its written in Zig, and the documentation is the best ever. Clearly I’m a fan

[cbrake]

@mjago, what OS are you running, and if Linux, are you using Wayland or X11?

I just did some more testing here, and on two machines with Arch/Plasma/KDE:

1. Wwith X11, I see the slow 3s start with Ghostty.
2. With Wayland, Ghostty starts instantly, like Alacritty.

So it may be related to X11 …

[mjago]

Hi Cliff

Here’s my config:

• OS: Ubuntu MATE 24.04.2 LTS x86_64

• Host: Apollo EL02R7

• Kernel: 6.8.0-58-generic

• Uptime: 3 days, 21 hours, 34 mins

• Packages: 3701 (dpkg), 13 (flatpak), 41 (snap)

• Shell: zsh 5.9

• Resolution: 1920x1080

• DE: MATE

• WM: Metacity (Marco)

• WM Theme: TraditionalGreen

• Theme: Yaru-MATE-light [GTK2/3]

• Icons: menta [GTK2/3]

• Terminal: ghostty

• CPU: Intel i5-10210U (8) @ 4.200GHz

• GPU: Intel CometLake-U GT2 [UHD Graphics]

• Memory: 8398MiB / 23723MiB

• $XDG_SESSION_TYPE: x11

• Ghostty 1.0.1

Version

• version: 1.0.1
• channel: stable

• Build Config
  • Zig version: 0.13.0
  • build mode : builtin.OptimizeMode.ReleaseFast
  • app runtime: apprt.Runtime.gtk
  • font engine: font.main.Backend.fontconfig_freetype
  • renderer : renderer.OpenGL
  • libxev : main.Backend.io_uring
  • GTK version:
    build : 4.6.9
    runtime : 4.14.2
  • libadwaita : enabled
    build : 1.1.7
    runtime : 1.5.0
  • libX11 : enabled

[cbrake]

@mjago

• $XDG_SESSION_TYPE: x11

Interesting – so you are running X11 too … that must not be it.

[collinbrake]

I recently tried Alacritty on Windows 10, with the shell set to WSL.

[terminal.shell]
program = "C:\\Windows\\System32\\wsl.exe"
args = ["~", "-d", "Ubuntu-24.04"]

It’s kind of neat to launch a terminal on Windows and have what feels like a full Linux environment without directly managing a VM.