When comparing ConsoleZ 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 ConsoleZ is ranked 17th. 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
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Pros
Pro Supports splitting tabs into views
In ConsoleZ, the user can split a tab into different views either horizontally or vertically.
Pro Fullscreen support
ConsoleZ can be opened in fullscreen.
Pro Small, portable installation
Install to OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive and your setting will be consistent everywhere.
Pro Supports typographic ligatures
Typographic ligatures occur when there are two or more letters joined as a single glyph, such as "æ".
Pro Easy transition from Console2
Being a fork of Console2, ConsoleZ is fully compatible. It even recognizes existing Console2 config files, making the transition easier.
Pro Input sent to one view can be sent to all
ConsoleZ allows for grouping of open views (panes) so that if an input is sent to one of them, it can be sent to all views grouped with it automatically.
Pro High DPI
This means that the display screen in ConsoleZ is sharp.
Pro Drop-down animation support
ConsoleZ can be used as a drop-down terminal inspired by the famous Quake terminal. Once opened, it can be toggled with a key of the user's choice. This makes it easier to have access to it from any window instead of having to cycle through all open applications.
Pro Localization support
ConsoleZ is available in French, Russian, German, and Japanese.
Pro Zooming with Ctrl-Mouse
The user can easily zoom by simply pressing Ctrl-Mouse.
Pro Windows 7 Jump List makes the user's life easier
Jump List is a useful feature that allows the user to view recent documents in a program that is pinned to the taskbar.
Pro Snippets
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 You can't scroll up and down for command history as those keys are bound to the scrollbox
Con No way to open pre-created tabs on startup
If you want to setup a certain number of tabs to automatically run pre-defined scripts in ConsoleZ or Console 2, you can't. You have to open everything manually every time you start the application.
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.