I finally went all in on switching to Alacritty. For the longest time, I’ve been a bit reluctant, sticking it out with the default terminal of my operating system du jour.
On Linux, running GNOME, the GNOME Terminal was more than sufficient. Terminal.app on macOS irks me due to how the window based on the font size, but overall, it’s treated me well.
So why the sudden change of heart? A few reasons.
Why I’m switching to Alacritty
First, Alacritty touts itself as being fast, due it being GPU-accelerated. I was skeptical at first, but good God, even if it’s anecdotal, it definitely felt faster to me. Slowness of my prompt starting up aside, output from commands felt snappy. Even positioning and resizing the window felt faster.
Second, I’ve been growing more and more tired of the Solarized Dark color scheme. The scheme itself is fine, but there’s just not enough colors for modern output. Errors thrown from npm will have large blocks of text that are the same color as the background. Looking through the color schemes available for Alacritty, I found Solarized Osaka, which has done a great job of modernizing things.
Third, as I’ve been jumping between Linux and macOS a lot more recently, I’ve been thinking it’s finally time for me to start embracing cross-platform apps again. For a while now, I’ve been digging my heels into using the OS provided options. My theory was, something like Terminal.app, is going to be the absolute best terminal on macOS. Same deal for GNOME, what could be better than GNOME Terminal? Now that GNOME has a Terminal and a Console app, I feel like my theory is a bust.
Fourth, configuring both GNOME Terminal and Terminal.app required a bit of poking in the preferences to get things just right. While it didn’t take much, I would much rather be able to configure things with flat files that I can keep in my dotfiles repository. Alacritty uses TOML files, and it didn’t take much for me to get things dialed in.
Finally, it was honestly just a good time for a change.
Conclusion
Shaking things up means learning something new. Learning something new leads to new brain wrinkles and new blog posts. The whole experience has led to me switching back to Neovim from Vim, after going back and forth a few times over the years. Switching to Alacritty even sparked me to start exploring alternatives to Zsh and Tmux. While newer isn’t always better, it’s always good to explore because you never really know until you try.
