Alacritty is a free open-source, fast, cross-platform terminal emulator, that uses GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) for rendering, which implements certain optimizations that are not available in many other terminal emulators in Linux.
Alacritty is focused on two goals simplicity and performance. The performance goal means, it should be speedy than any other terminal emulator available. The simplicity goal means, it doesn’t supports features such as tabs or splits (which can be easily provided by other terminal multiplexer – tmux) in Linux.
Prerequisites
Alacritty requires the most recent stable Rust compiler to install it.
Install Required Dependency Packages
1. First install Rust programming language using an rustup installer script and follow on screen instructions.
# sudo curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
--------- On Ubuntu/Debian --------- # apt-get install cmake libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev xclip --------- On CentOS/RHEL --------- # yum install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip # yum group install "Development Tools" --------- On Fedora --------- # dnf install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip --------- On Arch Linux --------- # pacman -S cmake freetype2 fontconfig pkg-config make xclip --------- On openSUSE --------- # zypper install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip
Installing Alacritty Terminal Emulator in Linux
3. Once you have installed all the required packages, next clone the Alacritty source code repository and compile it using following commands.
$ cd Downloads $ git clone https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty.git $ cd alacritty $ cargo build --release
4. Once the compilation process is complete, the binary will be saved in ./target/release/alacritty directory. Copy the binary to a directory in your PATH and on a dekstop, you can add the application to your system menus, as follows.
# cp target/release/alacritty /usr/local/bin # cp Alacritty.desktop ~/.local/share/applications
5. Next install the manual pages using following command.
# gzip -c alacritty.man | sudo tee /usr/local/share/man/man1/alacritty.1.gz > /dev/null
6. To add shell completion settings to your Linux shell, do the following.
--------- On Bash Shell --------- # cp alacritty-completions.bash ~/.alacritty # echo "source ~/.alacritty" >> ~/.bashrc --------- On ZSH Shell --------- # cp alacritty-completions.zsh /usr/share/zsh/functions/Completion/X/_alacritty --------- On FISH Shell --------- # cp alacritty-completions.fish /usr/share/fish/vendor_completions.d/alacritty.fish
7. Finally start Alacritty in your system menu and click on it; when run for the first time, a config file will be created under $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml, you can configure it from here.
Alacritty Terminal Emulator
For more information and configuration options, go to the Alacritty Github repository.
Alacritty is a cross-platform, fast, GPU accelerated terminal emulator focused on speed and performance. Although it is ready for daily usage, many features are yet to be added to it such as scroll back and more.