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Add to SafariWhen comparing rxvt-unicode vs Alacritty, the Slant community recommends rxvt-unicode for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” rxvt-unicode is ranked 1st while Alacritty is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose rxvt-unicode is:
Rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Low memory usage
Rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM.
Pro Can be daemonized to reduce resource usage
For those who want to lower their system's resource usage, rxvt-unicode allows for daemonization. This way you can run several instances of urxvt inside a single process.
Pro Supports terminal transparency
Changing the transparency of the terminal is allowed for in rxvt-unicode. This not only makes for eye candy but is also good for GUI usability.
Pro Minimum dependencies and simple text config
Pro Supports multiple font types
Multiple font types can be displayed flawlessly in rxvt-unicode.
Pro Handles bold text colour properly
Displays characters with text attribute bold actually as bold glyphs.
Pro High performance
Rxvt-unicode is much faster than most alternatives.
Pro Unicode support
International language support is provided through Unicode.
Pro Proper wrapping support
During selection and pasting wrapped text doesn't break into lines at place of wrapping.
Pro Fast text rendering
Rxvt-unicode has very fast text rendering, being able to render hundreds of MB of text in a very short time.
Pro Built-in Perl interpreter
It has a built-in Perl interpreter, meaning that no install is needed. Simply run urxvtperl.
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 Unicode characters that are too wide are blanked instead of clipped
If a character in a backup font is wider than the base font, urxvt substitutes the non-displayable character. A large letter space will show the wide characters, but the result is not reasonably spaced. There is a patch from 2014 that the urxvt maintainer will not merge.
Con Requires work to look acceptable
Out of the box, rxvt-unicode is not too pleasant to look at. Some understanding of Xresources is required for updating its appearance. That being said, the experience of customizing it can be very rewarding.
Con Requires work to configure useful functionality (clickable URL's, font scaling, tabs)
Con In daemon mode you can lose all your terminals
Because of sharing the same process terminal windows cannot be killed without sacrificing all other open windows. That becomes even more dangerous if you use multiple graphical managers without overriding socket with RXVT_SOCKET.
Con Unicode rendering is buggy
There are a few references to urxvt's buggy rendering, such as unicode combining characters, which bled through during scrolling.
Con Bloated
Exists because Xterm is complete trash. Although it has a lot of features, you will most likely never use them all.
Con No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"
Though this is still not available, you can download the patched version for 24bit, here.
Con Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel
Sometimes you may need to enlarge the font to improve readability, or shrink it to have more real estate and "hawk's eye" view of data. In rxvt you need to change the configuration file or use these commands:
$ function fontsize
{printf '\33]50;%s%d\007' "xft:Dejavu Sans Mono:size=$1::antialias=false"}
$ fontsize 22
Con No option to have a "reverse color" cursor
While you can choose the color of the cursor and the character under the cursor, there's no automatic "reverse color" for the cursor. This makes it impossible to use rxvt-unicode if you have a light background terminal and a dark background editor.
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.
