When comparing Terminal.app vs Alacritty, the Slant community recommends Terminal.app for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Mac?” Terminal.app is ranked 3rd while Alacritty is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Terminal.app is:
Since it is already installed by default, you don't need to worry about finding and installing another terminal.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Default terminal on Mac
Since it is already installed by default, you don't need to worry about finding and installing another terminal.
Pro Light on System Resources
Terminal.app lighter uses less system resources than iTerm having the same number of windows, tabs and processes going on.
Pro Great compatibility
Works with everything.
Pro Easily open man pages
By right clicking on a highlighted string you can easily search through the man pages for that string and the man page will open in a nice pop up window.
Pro Excellent xterm emulation support
Pro Beautiful
Terminal has nice colors and font options.
Pro Blazing fast rendering with GPU-accelerated
Written in Rust with a philosophy focusing on speed and simplicity, Alacritty is one of the fastest terminal emulators out there.
Pro Looks good
Alacritty looks very slick on Linux, especially with GNOME or i3.
Pro Simple configuration
The configuration file is very well made and easy to use. You can fine tune your preferences to perfection in a matter of minutes.
Pro Comprehensive font options
Alacritty can be configured to adjust line spacing (height), letter spacing (width), and individual character horizontal/vertical positions.
Pro Has support for image previews in w3m and ranger
Pro Has text ref-low when window is resized
Pro Fast and simple but with true color support
It's simple and fast like xterm or urxvt but with truecolor support which is a big plus if you use a terminal based code editor. Basically Alacritty has all the features you need and nothing you don't (if you're using tmux for multiplexing).
Cons
Con Updates are released rarely
Terminal usually gets an update when any new MacOS version is released, which is every couple of years.
Con Tab names are volatile
The tab names never stick -- it's imperative that this should work.
Con Background images are stretched rather than clipped
Con Occasionally crashes
Working remotely with a full buffer may cause complete terminal app crash.
Con Home and End keys require shift being pressed
Con Cannot into ligatures
Alacritty does not support ligatures in Fira Code, Iosevka etc.
Con Unreliable Font Rendering
Like a box of chocolate you never know what you're going to get.
Con Sacrifices basic features for raw performance
The Suzuki GSXR of terminals. Or your ditzy, blonde high school cheerleader; fast and pretty but not a lot going on under the hood.
Eschews a negative developmental philosophy towards including said functionality, with the official reason cited in project documentation as "Not within the realm of a terminal emulator" and ostensibly, "best left up to other tools such as terminal multiplexers" [such as screen or tmux]. Which is unfortunate when you factor in speed against terminal with the functionality built in vs their reliance on 3rd party tools:
tmux on alacritty: 'find /usr' time: 3.234s, cpu: 72%
tmux on konsole: find /usr' time: 1.777s, cpu: 96%
See issue here.