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Comment by FichteFoll | Hacker News Reader

I would keep an eye out on alacritty. It's a blazingly fast gpu-accelerared terminal emulator for Unix (currently) written in rust. According to their 0.2.0 announcement post, where they added scrollback support, Windows is next on the Roadmap.

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Thanks, I think I'd seen this one in the past but had ruled it out due to no Windows support (at the time).

Edit: Ah, also "doesn't have features such as tabs" ruled it out for me.

Alacritty isn't actually super fast, the author just opened three other emulators and decided to call Alacritty "the fastest terminal emulator on earth".

Kitty is much more full-featured and super fast. I've switched to it and love it to bits.

EDIT: Ah, it's not available for Windows, too bad. It's the best.

He did a bit more than that[0], and he comapred it to Kitty.

[0] https://jwilm.io/blog/alacritty-lands-scrollback/

Oh that's good, thanks for the heads up. Pretty recent post.

Yes, it only came out a few day ago; it's understandable you were not aware of it :)

> It's the best.

Heard of Konsole? It doesn't need GPU to achieve the same speed.

I like Kitty because of the built-in layouts, the speed is a bonus for me.

You can get a tab-like experience using tmux. This also gives you features like scrollback which Alacritty doesn't support out of the box.

Funny you should mention that - alacritty just merged their scrollback feature branch into master a couple of days ago.

> doesn't have features such as tabs

The lack of tabs is a feature for some of us. After all, why have tabs when you can have tmux? :)

I'm not saying you have to have tabs, if you want to paint your terminal pink with yellow fonts and render it upside down then go for it, but I'd like tabs :)

I needs to connects to multiple servers at the same time, and tmux sessions shouldn't be stacked. How can I do that without tabs?

If you have 2 tmux servers with different hotkeys you can totally nest them safely. I have a different hotkey prefix for my machine and then leave the default for servers. Works great!

Use multiple panes and/or windows? It's a terminal multiplexer, each panes is a separate terminal, just like tabs.

If you’re asking seriously... tmux has a unique interface which is probably not worth learning merely for the purpose of managing multiple active sessions. You also can’t wire it to accept proper GUI commands with the mac command key. Tabs make sense.

Personally I recommend Terminal.app :)

There are builds available for windows that seem to work: https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/28#issuecomment-37....

Using it at this point isn't viable however, since the Windows port uses rusttype for font rendering, and rusttype lacks support for hinting.

And like all these cool new *nix terminal projects, they seem to forget that a configuration GUI is worth having. Sure, you don't need it every day, but its really darn handy when you're first setting it up. The cycle of "Look at website, edit file, restart terminal, repeat, what are my font options again?" gets old really fast.

It's fast in the throughput sense. Typing latency is much worse than Terminal.app

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