When comparing Babun vs Alacritty, the Slant community recommends Alacritty for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” Alacritty is ranked 12th while Babun is ranked 14th. 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 Comes with bash and zsh out of the box
Babun comes with both bash and zsh out of the box. This gives both beginners and advanced users the choice of which shell to run.
Pro Comes with a package manager
Babun come with a package manager called Pact, which is an extremely simple yet powerful package manager similar to apt-get
or yum
for Linux.
Pro Easy access to powerful zsh features through integrated oh-my-zsh
Oh-my-zsh is a dead simple configuration and management for zsh (which is a pretty powerful shell), allowing even first time users to take advantage of the most powerful features it offers.
Pro Extends Cygwin functionality
Babun is built on top of Cygwin, meaning that Unix or Linux applications can be compiled and run on a Windows operating system from within a Linux-like interface.
Pro Decent, out-of-the-box remoting to Unix and others
256 color xterm is simple, but many programs simply do it wrong. Babun uses well-established command-line programs that do it right, and which then wrap them in a nicely themed package.
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 Dead project
Babun is not maintained and uses an old version of Cygwin from 2015.
Con Cannot exit node.js programs
When trying to exit a node program using Ctrl-C, the process doesn't actually exit.
Con No tabs
Babun has no support for tabs.
Con No spinner when installing packages with gems or npm
Con Does not work with Ansible
Executing Ansible modules (which helps configure and manage computers that combine multi-node software deployment) causes errors to arise.
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.