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Alacritty

Alacritty⚑

alacritty/alacritty is a cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator.

It excels in performance, you can compare it with your previous terminal emulator by running time tree ~ in both.

Install⚑

To install it in Debian, you can use the pre-built .deb releases from barnumbirr/alacritty-debian.

Usage⚑

Shortcuts⚑

  • Ctrl+Shift+Space: Enter vi mode.

Common issues⚑

Terminal functionality unavailable in remote shells⚑

When connecting to a remote system from an Alacritty terminal, for instance over SSH, it can occur that the system does not have an entry for Alacritty in its terminfo database (/usr/share/terminfo/a/alacritty). Therefore, all interactive terminal functionality does not work. This can be fixed by copying the terminfo for Alacritty to the remote server.

On the local host, using Alacritty:

infocmp > alacritty.terminfo  # export Alacritty's Terminfo

Now, copy it to the remote host using scp.

On the remote host:

tic -x alacritty.terminfo  # import Terminfo for current user

Note: After this, you will need to start a new SSH session to have the remote shell load the new Terminfo.

An usefulzsh function is:

s () {
    infocmp | ssh $@ 'tic -x /dev/stdin'
    ssh $@
}

Which will setup the shell always before connecting.