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Add to SafariWhen comparing Alacritty vs Windows Terminal, the Slant community recommends Windows Terminal for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” Windows Terminal is ranked 8th 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 Official Microsoft product
Pro Is an *actual* terminal emulator--what a Linux user would expect--like xterm
Not a command prompt/processor (i.e. shell) but a host for such applications.
Pro Multiple shell support
Pro Open Source under the MIT License
Pro Easy and well documented JSON settings
Pro Microsoft is nailing on its features
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 Requires latest version of Windows 10
Con Cannot have a mix of elevated and non elevated tabs
Con Unstable and buggy
Sometimes freezes and/or crashes.
Con Configured via (mostly) documented json
Con Slow
Con Doesn't have feature "Open Context Menu"
Poorly, this perfect terminal doesn't has this feature for Windows version.
