this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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I've been using Alacritty for the last 4 years, it's kinda the opposite of this nonsense. It's written in Rust, it's super light weight, highly optimised, and uses hardware acceleration to render the terminal. It's top of the chart for every terminal performance benchmark conceived.
However, that lightness and fastness comes at a cost. There are some basic features they just won't add because they're outside the scope of the project. Eg, tabs ("just use a tiling wm and do your own tabs in the wm") or a scrollbar ("just use a shell with a scrolling screen buffer like Tmux"), or different coloured backgrounds for each opened window ("why would anyone ever want to do that?").
My holy grail terminal would be something like Alacritty, written in Rust, blisteringly fast and light weight, but with tabs, scrollbar, bookmarks, etc.
I find myself falling back to using Konsole a lot these days, it's got all the features I want, is fast enough, and already installed on every system I use Plasma on.
I never understand the whole thing around "fast" terminals. How can a terminal be "slow"? Surely the terminal you're using has no effect on the programs you're calling, so what's being measured here?
The very few times your programs end up spamming a ton to stdout I guess
I get what you mean, it is an interesting question to explore.
For me, it think it appeals to my obsessive engineer-brain, I am hooked on chasing efficiency.
Eg, if one tool uses 10MB ram and takes 1second to complete a task, and another tool takes 50MB ram and 5 seconds to complete the same task, then clearly I want to use the more efficient one. The other must be wasting resources, right?
When it comes to real life software and real tasks, it is a lot more complicated than that, there are hundreds of variables to take into account and compare. But if one tool stands out among the others, optimising to achieve the best number (fastest time, lowest power draw, lowest ram use, etc) in each comparable variable, then I absolutely must use that one, it would be irresponsible not to, right?
Throw hardware acceleration into the mix, and it takes the situation to a new level. Why make my poor CPU render the text on the screen 60 times per second, when I can get the GPU to do it? It's just sitting there doing nothing, and it's better at the job anyway, and as a bonus you get even lower CPU utilisation and lower ram usage.
However, as I described in my previous post, chasing these numbers can come at the cost of usability. That's the case with Alacritty, and why I will be switching to wezterm.
Konsole is my second favorite terminal app. Wezterm may be your holy grail.
Wow, just had a look at the Wezterm GitHub page, read the features and the docs. I think you're right, it does look like it will replace Alacritty for me.
For anyone else wondering about the differences between Alacritty and wezterm, or still on the fence, read this thread, particularly the comment from wez: https://github.com/wez/wezterm/discussions/1769
I am using Konsole currently, as it works best in KDE. Should I switch to Alacritty? I like to have one window and the rest in tabs, its pretty great. I guess alacritty doesnt have that right? What all does fit in the config? Konsole has tabs with special descriptors using path, host, program etc. You can change the color scheme, its pretty nice.
If you're happy with your tools just keep using them.
I like using kitty personally. I mostly chose it because of the cute name but it does everything I need.
Give tmux or emacs a try. Or just use Kitty.