Alacritty

Alacritty is a modern, cross-platform terminal emulator that uses the GPU for rendering, making it one of the fastest terminals available. It follows a philosophy of simplicity and correctness: no tabs, no splits, no GUI configuration — just a very fast, very correct terminal that delegates those features to multiplexers like tmux or Zellij.

Features

• GPU rendering — uses OpenGL to render text, resulting in consistently smooth scrolling and low latency
• Cross-platform — runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and BSD
• Vi mode — keyboard-driven scrollback search and selection without touching the mouse
• Regex search — search the scrollback buffer with regular expressions
• TOML configuration — fully configurable via a single ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml file
• Live config reload — changes to the config file are picked up instantly, no restart needed
• True color & ligature support — full 24-bit color and font ligature rendering

Installation

cargo install alacritty

Or via your package manager:

# Arch Linux
pacman -S alacritty

# macOS
brew install --cask alacritty

# Fedora / RedHat
dnf install alacritty

# Debian/Ubuntu (via PPA)
add-apt-repository ppa:aslatter/ppa
apt install alacritty

Configuration

Alacritty is configured via a TOML file at ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml. Here's a minimal example:

[window]
padding = { x = 12, y = 10 }
decorations = "buttonless"
opacity = 0.97

[font]
normal = { family = "JetBrains Mono", style = "Regular" }
size = 13.0

[colors.primary]
background = "#0f1117"
foreground = "#e2e4ed"

[keyboard]
bindings = [
  { key = "K", mods = "Control|Shift", action = "ClearHistory" },
]

Tips

• Pair with tmux or Zellij for tabs and splits — this is the intended workflow
• Use Vi mode (Ctrl+Shift+Space by default) to navigate and copy from the scrollback buffer without a mouse
• The alacritty msg subcommand lets you control a running instance from the command line, useful for scripting window creation