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Add to SafariWhen comparing Hyper vs Alacritty, the Slant community recommends Alacritty for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Mac?” Alacritty is ranked 5th while Hyper is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Alacritty is:
Written in Rust with a philosophy focusing on speed and simplicity, Alacritty is one of the fastest terminal emulators out there.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Beautiful
Pro Great community support, extensions etc
Pro Fully customizable
If you are familiar with web standards, you will be at home in this terminal.
Pro Limited set of features out of the box
Very few features are built into the product itself as the intention is for the plugins to provide most of them. If a plugin doesn't exist just as you like, write it. That extensibility, folks.
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 Limited set of features out of the box
Very few features are built into the product itself as the intention is for the plugins to provide most of them. Yet, taking the other listed con of immature plugin ecosystem into account, this leads to either living without the feature or using an unstable plugin.
Con Can be slow
Example benchmark against iTerm in this Youtube video.
Con Immature plugin ecosystem
Very often you'll find features behaving unexpectedly after installing plugins. Even the popular ones.
Con CJK languages not working
Con Needs an account to work and sends your commands to some server
Apart from the security implications this is slowing things down, making it sometimes unusable!
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.
