When comparing Sakura vs Alacritty, the Slant community recommends Sakura for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Sakura is ranked 6th while Alacritty is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Sakura is:
Sakura has very few dependencies, it's very lightweight, and great if your computer does not have many resources.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
Sakura has very few dependencies, it's very lightweight, and great if your computer does not have many resources.
Pro True colour support
Supports full 24-bit color.
Pro Great unicode support
Even shows combining chars correctly.
Pro Few dependencies
Pro Starts quickly even on lower-end machines
Sakura's quick start-up time becomes noticeable with lower-end machine's such as Eeepc 1015PX (Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz and 2 GB of RAM).
Pro Tab support
Pro Easy zoom
Sakura supports zooming through keyboard keys (Ctrl+'+'
to zoom in and Ctrl+'-'
to zoom out).
Pro Ready for wayland
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 libvte/gtk
It has gnome dependencies.
Con Doesn't provide many configuration options
Sakura does not have any advanced configuration capabilities.
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.
