Switching To The Alacritty Terminal Emulator

it's time for me to hop again and I'm not talking about window manager hopping and certainly I'm not distro hopping it's time for me to hop terminal emulators some of the terminal emulators I've used in the past include termite xterm urx VT and here recently I've been on s Steve for about a year and all of those terminal emulators by the way are great they're fine terminal emulators I would be happy using any of those for terminal emulators but they all have their own quirks their own issues no terminal emulator that I've tried so far has been perfect so I was looking for another solution and I think that solution for me is going to be Allegra so what get me thinking about this was a couple of weeks ago you guys know I recently put up a website over at distro tube comm and over there I also put up a web form and on the web form one of the first posts I made was I was asking the community hey what is your preferred terminal emulator and I listed about 10 options including X term you are xvt termite st kitty alacrity console genome terminal terminator and then of course the last option is other I was surprised that so many of you guys are using s T which is a great terminal emulator of course a lot of you guys were also using the Janome terminal I was not surprised by that but I when I put al Accra T in there I expected some of you guys to actually have tried out alacrity it gets a lot of hype about possibly being the fastest terminal emulator out there and it received no votes and this got me to thinking well nobody's really trying this thing out nobody's using it maybe I should give it a shot and see what it's all about and see if it actually deserves some attention so alacrity is hosted over on github for those of you not familiar with this project it's still kind of young it's only been around a couple of years or so uh maybe three years I'm if that anyway it's a cross-platform gpu-accelerated terminal emulator so cross-platform means it's available on a variety of operating systems including good news flash Linux it's GPU X right in that is the claim to fame there that's what should make this terminal emulator so much faster than all the other terminal emulators is it uses your GPU it offloads some of the work to the GPU because it uses the OpenGL renderer because it has that GPU acceleration it should be faster it's also written in rust I know a lot of proponents of the rust programming language like to tout its speeds reading a little bit from the blurb here on the github page alacrity quote is the fastest terminal emulator in existence in quote the fact that they just boldly put that out there like it's a matter of fact has me a little bit concerned surely they wouldn't write that if it wasn't the case but until I install it and play with it I don't know but let me switch to my desktop here and I'm gonna open up Allegra T and let me zoom in here a little bit so you can see what's going on this is alacrity out of the box with this is a default configuration I haven't modified it in any way out of the box you know it's got some a pretty nice color scheme it's got some sensible keyboard shortcuts but really the first thing you want to do when you start alacrity start using alacrity is start customizing it and you need to do that by creating your own custom config that custom config in your home directory dot config slash alacrity slash alacrity dot yml now don't worry about that what you need to do is you need to go and find the default alacrity dot yml on your system so for me I have locate installed so I'm just gonna locate alacrity dot yml and there is the default one what you need to do is you need to copy that over to your home directory dot config slash alacrity slash alacrity dot yml and i've already done that and then once you have that created I would just open this config file up I'll just open it in film since we want to stay in the terminal here and it's a very substantial config file and you can customize everything from the window size the window title the font various font aspects you have a different font face for bold versus italic versus bold italic you can offset the font if you want the character spacing to be closer together or further apart you can also do line spacing you can do window padding you can do all kinds of things and I have modified this somewhat I have changed to a different color scheme than the default I went ahead and you guys know I've been using the Dracula I think color scheme and Emacs and my ST terminal so I went ahead and copied the Dracula color scheme over into my alacrity dot yml so this is my alacrity and you can see I've got the the Dracula color scheme working for me here I can launch a CH top here you can see looks very similar to what my ST config looked like let me zoom in and one thing you will notice I do have a little padding around the window if I didn't have a padding the tilde character for the alias for the home directory it would be butted up right against the window as it often is and things like you are xB T and X term and all those other terminal emulators but the fact that I can adjust all of this again I if I go down the config file you will see things like padding right here padding I put six pixels of padding for the x coordinate and the y coordinate that gives me the padding around the terminal window four colors of course I've set the primary colors for the background and the foreground as well as the color scheme your typical sixteen color color scheme here and you can also play around with opacity now by default there is no opacity but if you wanted to what I could do is I could comment this line out and I will go down here and uncomment this line out and then if I write that I'm gonna complain one thing you do need to be careful and I'm glad I made this mistake on camera is this config file the alacrity dot yml is very picky about the spacing so you have to get the spacing right so in this I think the problem is that I had a space in front of that line you know in front of background underscore opacity I need to get that's right yeah and now the error went away and everything looks good here I can quit out of that and just do it LS there yeah everything looks good in this I really like the look and feel of alacrity it does seem to be snappy and what I really love is that substantial config file that I just briefly showed you has so many options in it and that is so much better than the way you have to configure specially the old-school terminal emulators and like x-term and you are xvt because who likes fooling with the X resources file it's kind of clunky it's sometimes it's really hard to get the settings exactly the way you want using X resources also ST I really like the ST terminal but I don't like patching ST I don't like recompiling ST every time I make a minor change having a terminal with a proper config file with a lot of options like you can really customize this thing to your heart's content I that just that fact alone makes me want to switch to a lacquer as my default terminal emulator for a little while just to see how I get along with it now playing around with alacrity I will say I did find one minor gripe so boom let me open up something in film I'll open up actually mic VMRC because what I want to show you is actually in the vim RC but say I want to do a vertical split here and split the window let me open up another config and what I'll open up nerd tree well I'm hearing them as well now typically film does have some Mouse functionality especially when you have a split frame like this you know you could grab the border and adjust the frames and hear a nerd tree you know I can click on some of this stuff and I can get the directories to open if they have you know sub directories and files and these sub directories I can do all that with the mouse as well as the keyboard but initially in electorate E the very first time I opened them and started playing around that wasn't the case I had no mouse functionality inside them you know especially in the areas where the mouse typically worked worked in every other terminal emulator I've ever used so I was kind of concerned about that but I did find the solution and the solution was this sitting here you can see I made a comment in my film RC this fixes the mouse issues using the alacrity terminal and you need to set space ttyl mouse equals SGR if you add that line then all of a sudden the mouse works and just fine and M so get out of that clear the screen but of course you guys want to see the speed of Allegra the speed a little bit it would not be scientific but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open up two different terminals I'll make them the same size and a tiling window manager that's easy so I'll open up electorate e here now keep the font size the default font size I won't sue min and then by comparison let's open up X term an X term is on the right here and we will run the same command and time it so I'm gonna type the command time because I want to get the time on this and the command I'm gonna run is tree space root this command typically takes a little while on most terminal emulators let's see how long it takes in Allegra I will say just watching the animation that animation is very very smooth typically when you run this kind of command on most terminal emulators graphically there's a lot of glitching you know the terminal kind of wigs out that was very smooth just the animation and the time very quick so that was tree on route and it ran in 14.3 seconds and that's the real time and let's start timing tree on route here in X term and again just looking at it you can tell X term is struggling a little more with the graphics then what alacrity was right it's not nearly as smooth the animation of all the techs flying by it's not as smooth so let's see how long this takes I've already been waiting a lot longer than what al equity took I'll wait a little while longer and I'm still waiting and I'm still waiting I went and grabbed me a cup of coffee and it finally finished so running tree on route took two minutes 34 seconds in extern where it took 14 seconds in Allegra t so I don't know you know this is just one test between one other terminal emulator I mean it's not scientific at all but the fact that there is that big of a difference running tree on route between alacrity and x-term quite frankly is surprising to me probably surprising to you guys that's a crazy different sense speed so I think I'm gonna use the letter T for a little while looking forward to this the speed difference really impresses me and one other thing I want to do though is if I'm going to take the trouble of moving to alacrity especially if it's all about speed I need to start replacing other things especially inside the command line that may be an improvement as far as speed some of the command line utilities you guys have told me about over the last couple of years and I never really gave a serious look to one of them is dust which is a replacement for D you the standard D you command there is supposed to be a faster alternative to D you called dust and it is in the arch user repository the a you are if you don't have dust in your repository you can always install it with cargo cargo install d you - dust would be the command you would need to run to install it it is a rust program what dust is supposed to be a little quicker and just running dust rather than D you without arguments is really nice because instead of getting just a ton of output on the screen actually it does this much more sensibly it just shows me the directories that are the biggest on my system so I just actually man page dust if it has a man page it does not does it have help dust - - help does have some help options really not that many flags with it but I may go ahead and just alias D you over to dust since it's supposed to be a speed improvement another speed improvement you go told me about is stop using grip grip is slow which I you know when I made my awk video a few weeks back you guys were like hey you know what your right grip is slow don't use grip use rip grip and rip grip is also in the arch repositories rip we're up is probably in most Linux distributions repositories and then once you have rip grip you can grip some things for example if I ran a history command and I wanted to grip everything that involves the string the CD you know I could do that but you know what let's time it let's time history piped into grip CD and it runs very fast this shouldn't run very fast it's not a lot going on the real time is point zero zero four seconds now let's run it with rip grip and grip is alias to RG same command time it actually it's the same time point zero zero four seconds real time the user time was slightly better with real grip zero zero four seconds compared to zero zero five seconds and I'm sure if we did something a little more substantial that would probably be a much bigger time difference so I'm gonna go ahead and start using dust and rip grip and we may look into some other anti bloat command line utilities along the way so what do you guys think about alacrity those of you that have used it what was your experience did you like it were you happy with it are you still using it and did you switch to something else also for those of you that haven't been over to the distro tube comm website go to the forums and you can still vote in that poll and you could still reply to that thread if you want to discuss your favorite terminal emulator over there now before I go this show was made possible by Chris DJ Donny Dylan George Chaplin 8-core Benny and lambda Michael Mitchell Rob Sean Stallman and Willie these guys are the producers of the show without these guys this episode about the alacrity terminal emulator wouldn't have been possible shows also brought to you by all these other fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these generous folks helped support my work over on patreon if you'd like to support the channel please consider doing so you'll find me at distro tube over on page alright guys peace

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 233,751

Keywords: alacritty, terminal, terminal emulator, linux, gnu linux, bsd terminal, windows terminal, mac terminal, linux terminal, free and open source, gpu accelerated, alacritty mac, alacritty windows, alacritty terminal emulator, alacritty set up, alacritty config, terminal emulator linux, terminal emulators, terminal emulator tutorial, gpu accelerated rendering, linux terminal tutorial, linux terminal emulator, mac terminal tutorial, mac terminal customize

Id: PZPMvTvUf1Y

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2020