Alacritty, a terminal emulator written in Rust, now supports Windows | Hacker News Reader

Alacritty, a terminal emulator written in Rust, now supports Windows

github.com

52 pointseberkund13 comments

I'd wait for it to switch from winpty (3rd party hack to get a PTY) to the new Windows ConPTY API. There is already an active branch towards adding this https://github.com/davidhewitt/alacritty/tree/consoleapi

Also I think it's worth noting Alacritty's main selling point of speed is currently dubious at best on first class ports, I wouldn't expect this to be very speedy on Windows.

Interestingly it doesn't work faster for Vim+Tmux on MacOS. I always thought it's issue of iTerm2 and Terminal.app but as README states it's probably something related to Vim or Tmux.

Glad Windows is supported now.

EDITED: Just tried to run it on Windows and didn't get it working. I expect I should not have Rust installed, right? Error says something about winpty-agent - "agent executable does not exist"

You need to also download "winpty-agent.exe" from the releases page.

See this for more context: https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/1818

I recommend looking into Kitty. It is also GPU accelerated, and comes with its own programmable windowing + tiling system. With some configuring I was able to ditch tmux.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

I actually use Kitty with tmux/vim. I noticed a massive improvement in rendering speed over iTerm. This was after messing with iTerm's own accelerated rendering which wasn't as much of an improvement as I had hoped.

There is no mouse support for Windows. So if you need that, you need to wait or add it yourself.

I can't wait for it to render PowerShell at a blazing fast speed. /s

What exactly does it run on GPU. Is it a dropin replacement for Term2 or i lose lots of things?

> a terminal emulator written in Rust

Is this the headline feature? That it is written in Rust? Can someone explain why this would be a compelling reason to install this?

It's a link to the github repo, submitted to a fairly developer-centric website. It's not a reason to install this, it is why readers here might be interested in looking at the source/the project in detail.

It's the title of the submission though, and arguably one of the least interesting aspects of the project. I would be interested in the fact that it claims to be the fastest, and that it runs on the GPU.

> arguably one of the least interesting aspects of the project. I would be interested in...

You're conflating what you are interested in with what other HN readers might be. That it's written in Rust is arguably one of the most interesting aspects of the project for any developer interested in the source code, which is the exact example the comment you're replying to gave. You seem purely interested in it as a user, which is fine, but far from universal.

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