When comparing Yakuake vs Alacritty, the Slant community recommends Alacritty for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Alacritty is ranked 7th while Yakuake is ranked 10th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Drop-down terminal makes for ease of use
Yakuake is a drop-down terminal. This means that you can press, for example, F12, and it slides downward from the top edge of the screen. After you are done with it, you can then hit F12 again and it slides back on top.
Pro Very customizable
Almost everything in Yakuake is customizable: from split view, fullscreen mode, configurable dimensions, to animation speed and keybindings.
Pro Split layout
You can easily split any tab into different windows and run several commands at the same time then monitor and change them with ease. You won't find this feature in guake or tilda!
Pro Tabs support
Yakuake supports tabs, while working with several tabs is very easy. By default: to open a new tab press Ctrl + Shift + t
. To move through them: Shift + left/right arrow
.
Pro Monitor for activity/silence
When an activity is let working (e.g.: compiling some source or upgrading some system), and you forgot it, a nice popup and sound will alert you when the command prompt returned on that term.
Pro Unlimited scroll history
You can scroll, inside the same terminal session, infinitely, so no command should be lost, even it isn't stored yet on history.
Pro Lightweight
Opens at 40MB and stays below 100MB with some tabs splitted in four each. So if you need to have many terminals emulators opened in your desktop environment, is the a very light solution for all the features it includes.
Pro Quick search support
Search directly in your favourite search engine just by selecting something and right clicking. It will open the browser result page.
Pro Quick move through splits and tabs
You can move through terminals with Ctrl+Shift+Cursors or tabs with Shift+Cursor keys, so no need to touch you mouse or pad, making working with terms even faster.
Pro Can be scripted using qdbus
Window composition and commands inside can be scripted using qdbus.
You can make desktop shortcuts to automatically create tabs, split windows and connect to ssh sessions or launch monitoring programms. Very useful.
Pro Wayland support
As the entire Plasma Desktop, yakuake already has full support for Wayland.
Pro Save output as text
You can save the output of a terminal directly to a text file, to work properly with it later.
Pro Enhanced focused terminal
You can configure yakuake to show a visual altert when you change the terminal. So even if you have many splittings and you don't use the mouse to change between them, you can easily see where you are at any moment.
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 Theming options are very limited, Does not integrate naturally with the DE
Con KDE Library dependencies
While not an issue if using KDE, when trying to use this terminal in other desktop environments or window managers, there will be a large amount of dependencies tied to the app. This makes for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean, this may be an issue.
Con No sessions support
Con No Windows support
Con Slow
Is not slow at all. I have yakuake installed in all my computers (8) and it launches immediatly after pressing the hotkey. Must be a error from yourt side.
Yakuake has started to get really slow with the latest updates: it takes up to 3 seconds to start up after you have clicked the assigned hotkey.
Con Heavy
Not true at all. I from far one of the lightiest graphical terminals out there. Mine is 14MB with a bunch of split views and 4 tabs at the moment of writing this.
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.