Alacritty is the fastest terminal emulator in existence. Using the GPU for rendering enables optimizations that simply aren't possible in other emulators. Alacritty currently supports macOS and Linux, and Windows support is planned before the 1.0 release.
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 many features like tabs or scroll back as in other terminals. Instead, it is expected that users of Alacritty make use of a terminal multiplexer such as tmux
.
This initial release should be considered to be pre-alpha software--it will have issues. Once Alacritty reaches an alpha level of readiness, precompiled binaries will be provided for supported operating systems.
The only supported installation method at this time is from source. Proper installers will be added prior to the 1.0 release of Alacritty. This section will walk you through how to build from source on both macOS and Ubuntu.
Install rustup.rs
Clone the source code:
git clone https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty cd alacritty
Make sure you have the right Rust compiler installed. Alacritty requires nightly Rust. Run
rustup override set nightly
If you run into problems, you can try a known-good version of the compiler by running
rustup override set $(<rustc-version)
On Ubuntu, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's an apt
command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
apt-get install cmake libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev xclip
On Arch Linux, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a pacman
command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
pacman -S cmake freetype2 fontconfig xclip
On Fedora, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a dnf
command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
dnf install freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip
On openSUSE, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a zypper
command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.
zypper install freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip
On Void Linux, install following packages before compiling Alacritty:
xbps-install cmake freetype-devel freetype expat-devel fontconfig xclip
If you build Alacritty on another Linux distribution, we would love some help filling in this section of the README.
Once all the prerequisites are installed, compiling Alacritty should be easy:
cargo build --release
If all goes well, this should place a binary at target/release/alacritty
. BEFORE YOU RUN IT: Install the config file as described below; otherwise, many things (such as arrow keys) would not work. If you‘re on macOS, you’ll need to change the monospace
font family to something like Menlo
.
Many linux distributions support desktop entries for adding applications to system menus. To install the desktop entry for Alacritty, run
sudo cp target/release/alacritty /usr/local/bin # or anywhere else in $PATH cp Alacritty.desktop ~/.local/share/applications
Although it‘s possible the default configuration would work on your system, you’ll probably end up wanting to customize it anyhow. There is an alacritty.yml
at the git repository root. Copy this to either $HOME/.alacritty.yml
or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.yml
and run Alacritty.
Many configuration options will take effect immediately upon saving changes to the config file. The only exception is the font
and dpi
section which requires Alacritty to be restarted. For further explanation of the config file, please consult the comments in the default config file.
If you run into a problem with Alacritty, please file an issue. If you‘ve got a feature request, feel free to ask about it. Keep in mind that Alacritty is very much not looking to be a feature-rich terminal emulator with all sorts of bells and widgets. It’s primarily a cross-platform, blazing fast tmux
renderer that Just Works.
iTerm2
and Terminal.app
. I've found that if tmux is running on another machine which is connected to Alacritty via SSH, this issue disappears. Actual throughput and rendering performance are still better in Alacritty.env WAYLAND_DISPLAY= alacritty
Alacritty is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.