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Comment by bionade24 | Hacker News Reader

When stepping away from KDE to sway, tried diffrent terminal emulators, but especially compared konsole, termite & alacritty. Back then (October 2020) I found alacritty to have really slow startup times on high-end machines (and got confirmation that's it's not my fault on IRC). Even massive Konsole started up faster. It also treats Wayland badly. So I settled with Termite, which I really like so far. It's sad that it's discontinued, but it's a shame that alacritty should be _the_ replacement for it.

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This is a weird aside, and almost certainly not your problem since it sounds like you're using Wayland, but for anyone else reading, I had slow start up times with alacrity myself, and sometimes getting a blank window, and it turned out to be a problem with xserver providing weird numbers for my monitor when it tries to figure out DPI, and `WINIT_X11_SCALE_FACTOR=1 alacritty` solves it.

Best I can figure its not really a winit/alacritty bug, but some gremlin with my particular monitor/gpu/nvidia drivers.

Dumb question perhaps, but why does startup time matter much for a terminal emulator of the tabbed / multi-window variety? E.g. Konsole uses one process for all windows and tabs, so it only really starts when you close every terminal.

Because of tiled window managers. Having many terminals open is often more ergonomic than the terminal's tab support.

Konsole being a KDE app lets you disable internal tabbing. It's still single-process, so opening new terminals is just opening a new window from the same process.

I've been using Alacrity/Sway for at least that long, and it's been perfect. Maybe I have a low end machine.

How does it misbehave on Wayland?

There does seem to be some machines that Alacritty runs poorly on, but there doesn't seem to be a pattern of hardware vendor/OS or anything. On one of 3 machines I run it on (work MBP, personal laptop on Arch, personal desktop on Arch), I see the slow startups people comment on. I always assumed it was just a mac port issue, but I've seen others comment that it works fine on Mac, or that it doesn't work fine on Linux. It's not directly spec related either, as the work MBP is more powerful than my personal laptop

I believe it was about copy/pasting with wl-clipboard, which didn't worked. May have to try it now again.

I’ve been on Sway for a few weeks now. Copy and paste worked immediately in Alacritty (without installing wl-clipboard), and it starts in less than 100ms with a warm cache (on a new and powerful laptop).

I retried and it now works fine on all my new and old machines. Seems like the bugs are solved.

I settled on kitty, personally. I quite like it, and its image supports works very well with ranger!

Personally, I can't see a difference for startup times between urxvt and alacritty, both of which are near instant on my i3 setup, but I have heard of some users experiencing long startups on mac. I'd wager theres a bug there to be found.

Drew DeVault just started recommending foot over Alacritty. You might want to check it out.

are you trying urxvt? it have a daemon mode so each new terminal create only window but not whole new instance.

Urxvt normally opens in ~.2s on my ancient laptop and uses ~15M RAM. Though running it in daemon/client brings that time down to ~.04s and memory to ~1.5M per window, the possible hang/crash freezing/killing all terminals in the process probably isn't worth it.

It's not wayland-native, though.

I use it with sway on a laptop that doesn't support OpenGL well enough for other terminals, it's okay, but I miss some features, and other <indows could snoop on it. I also had to install xwayland for it.

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