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Add to SafariWhen comparing Alacritty vs Tabby Terminal, the Slant community recommends Tabby Terminal for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” Tabby Terminal is ranked 4th while Alacritty is ranked 12th.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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).
Pro It looks just beautiful
Pro It's open source
This helps the community to move software forward and to make it even better.
Pro It comes with plugins
Pro Customizable
A lot of things can be easily configured, e.g. color theme, size, window frame behavior, tab location, cursor style, hotkeys, etc.
Pro Is cross-platform
Even the question was "...for Windows", it's nice if you can use your tools over different platforms.
Pro Under active development
Hyper development has basically stalled out.
Pro Excellent interface
At start opens last session terminals. Also has terminal tabs.
Pro Integrated GitBash, Cmd, PowerShell, and WSL
Pro Integrates with git-bash with a simple toggle in the interface
Cons
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.
Con Some functions still fail
Con Graphics bugs on all platforms
On Windows 10 and Debian 11, Debian 12 the graphics starts bug after some usage. It always happens, even on different computers.
Con Slow with input lag
Sadly, Electron strikes again. The input lag is noticeable and annoying. Startup also takes like 2 seconds or more (On an i7 from 2016 with SSD).
Con 80MB
It's huge. The amount of resources it consumes is not justifiable.
Con Cannot remove the default profiles
For example, you installed Arch Linux for Windows Subsystem for Linux some time ago, but now you have deleted it and currently use Ubuntu on WSL. After that, if you decide to try this terminal emulator, you'll find Arch there without an option to remove the profiles already included in Terminus.
