Ubuntu PPAs for Alacritty

Alacritty is a free and open source terminal emulator for Linux, Windows and BSD. It uses GPU for rendering to increase its speed. It comes with vi mode with mimic vi cursor motion, selections and copy text to the clipboard and open URLs. There are advantages to using Alacritty, and many of Alacritty's features were inspired by termite. The reason for installing termite is this: If you use Alacritty on a Pi 4, but want to SSH into the Pi 4 via a Pi Zero, your keyboard is going to be janked up. So you will need to install the termite-terminfo.

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Sudo apt install alacritty Once installed, open it from the System Application Launcher or press Ctrl + Alt + T on your keyboard.
Alacritty is the fastest terminal emulator in existence. Using the GPU forrendering enables optimizations that simply aren't possible without it.Alacritty currently supports macOS, Linux, BSD, and Windows. Alacritty is a terminal emulator with a strong focus on simplicity andperformance.

If you use Ubuntu based GNU/Linux and wish to install the elegant and very fast GPU-accelerated Alacritty terminal emulator, you may have noticed that the official repositories do not have it. To get it directly from the developer repositories on Github, you must install Rust, then download and compile Alacritty source code. If you do not mind the extra time and effort, that is the best way keep Alacritty current on your system. In my case, I wanted a simpler way to install precompiled binaries, almost as fresh as the Github source, but without installing Rust on my system.

It turns out that Ubuntu users may get Alacritty from two different Personal Package Archives (PPAs); one updating very often, and another updating at a lower rate. First, there is the PPA run by Michael Aaron Murphy. His PPA has been up for a long time, and it carries the more stable releases. As of this writing, it contains Alacritty version 0.6.0, last updated December 29, 2020. Use the following commands in a terminal to add it to your software sources:

The more frequently updated PPA, therefore with possibly less stable versions, is operated by Antoine Latter. It lists as an 'Ubuntu' ppa, but the only software in it is Alacritty, and the latest version today is Alacritty 0.7.1, updated February 5, 2021. To install from this PPA, use the commands below:

The default configurations for Alacritty (colors, font, etc.) are good. I did adjust things slightly for my own preferences, changing the font style and size, going to a darker color scheme, setting transparency, and cursor blinking. It is all tweakable in a yaml file.

If you ever want to completely remove Alacritty from your computer, use the purge command:

If you ever want to remove access to a PPA, simply install the Package 'ppa-purge':

Then use one of the commands below to purge the PPA, as apropriate for the source you intend to not use:

Install Alacritty Windows

I am quite pleased with the responsiveness of my terminal since switching to Alacritty, and hope the tips given above will help you install and enjoy it as developers continue to make it better.

Install Alacritty Ubuntu

Tags: Alacritty, Ubuntu, PPAs, Terminal Emulators

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Recently stumbled on this comment from lobste.rs. I have heard of Alacritty before but never had a chance to try it out. This time I have decided to at least check it out.

What is Alacritty?

Alacritty claims to be a really fast terminal emulator. It has a unique feature according to its description:

Alacritty is the fastest terminal emulator in existence. Using the GPU for rendering enables optimizations that simply aren’t possible in other emulators.

I used to use rxvt-unicode back in Arch Linux and have found it to be very fast considering its small amount of features (which seems to be another advantage of Alacritty). I then switched to iTerm2 when I moved to MacOS.

Installation of Alacritty

Installation is very simple. All I needed to do was install Rust using rustup, clone the repository (first few steps can also be found here), and follow the link here. I always forget about Github’s wiki and missed the documentation about “MacOS application bundle”. I originally did a cp target/release/alacritty /usr/local/bin before finding the wiki.

After installation the configuration can be found at $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml (one of the paths where Alacritty searches for the configuration).

Issues/Missing Features

I really like Alacritty and while it is fast, it does still need some features and fixes. It sacrificed features over speed. While I like that it has lesser features compared to most terminal emulators, it may have went beyond in leaving its features behind. One comment from /r/programming says this:

Comment from discussion Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust.

Here are some features that I find might be useful for me and luckily there are already issues on Github to implement these features (these are also MacOS specific):

I use emacs mode in my shell and commonly use combinations such as alt + b (to move a word back) or alt + . (to insert last argument from previous command). iTerm2 has an option to have the “Left option” key act as “+esc”. Can’t entirely remember what “+esc” is although it allows me to use the same key combinations similar to Linux with the alt key.
Alacritty doesn’t have this (yet) although a workaround is to specify the combinations and provide the characters it would “invoke”. An example for alt + b and alt + f would be these:
Currently, Alacritty doesn’t have support for full screen. For iTerm2 specifically, it has support for non-native full screen in MacOS. This occupies the whole screen and sits on top of the other applications (unlike the green expand button which seems to occupy a whole other space).
Currently when running the MacOS application bundle through either spotlight or Alfred, only a single instance of Alacritty is allowed. I usually run tmux and vim in separate windows (or tabs in iTerm2). It would be nice if Alacritty supports this.
It’s a bit difficult to open links from Alacritty. In iTerm2, you could do a combination of alt + command + mouse left click to open a link in the default browser. Back in rxvt-unicode, Arch Linux has a documentation on having Clickable URLs.

While Alacritty is still in its early version:

Lagune 2 arbeitsbuch pdf. The software is considered to be at an alpha level of readiness–there are missing features and bugs to be fixed, but it is already used by many as a daily driver.

I’m still happy that these features are planned to be implemented. I haven’t used Alacritty really long yet. I might go back to iTerm2 but for now I will probably still be using Alacritty. The missing features I can live without.