Alacritty – GPU-accelerated Terminal App
Got 5 minutes today to finally try Alacritty, it’s a pretty cool terminal emulator available for major Unix and Unix-like operating systems.
Installing Alacritty in MacOS
Homebrew installation works like a treat:
greys@MacBook-Pro:~ $ brew cask install alacritty ==> Satisfying dependencies ==> Downloading https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/releases/download/v0.3.2/Alacritty-v0.3.2.dmg ==> Downloading from https://github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com/51980455/f70ead00-651a-11e9-8483-86010190b4c6?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS ######################################################################## 100.0% ==> Verifying SHA-256 checksum for Cask 'alacritty'. ==> Installing Cask alacritty ==> Moving App 'Alacritty.app' to '/Applications/Alacritty.app'. 🍺 alacritty was successfully installed!
WOW: I did NOT expect this beer mug to actually copy-paste from my iTerm2 window into WordPress! Pretty cool!
Why Alacritty is Cool
A few reasons come to mind:
- it’s GPU accelerated – meaning it gets faster and works better if you have a decent graphics card – it actually makes visible different when scrolling through large amoutns of command output
- Alacritty has config file – yep, it’s an old fashioned regular config file – actually it’s YAML but that means it’s still human readable, only structured.
- Alacritty is multi-platform – Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and even Windows installers are available