Alacritty

If you use Linux then most likely you also use a terminal. One of the things that I still have not gotten used to after switching from windows is how customizable Linux really is. In this case the terminal. The first thing I asked myself when I came across Alacritty is “why?”. It never clicked until rwxrob made a comment about how he was using Alacritty as his terminal.

Alacritty is a GPU-accelerated terminal built in Rust. In this blog I am going to cover how to install and configure Alacritty. I am using ubuntu 18.04, but the installation section covers other distributions.

First to install the required debian dependencies

sudo apt install cmake pkg-config libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev python3

We also need rust which can be easily installed by the following cURL command.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

The installation page of Alacritty suggests using the stable compiler which can be enabled via the following.

rustup override set stable && rustup update stable

Once all of the dependencies are installed the next thing to do is to clone the Alacritty repository via the following git command.

git clone https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty && cd alacritty

If you’re on a debian distribution, then you can run the following commands.

cargo install cargo-deb && cargo deb --install -p alacritty

Then to set the default terminal run

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.default-applications.terminal exec 'alacritty'

ctrl + alt + t and enjoy the awesome terminal!