Today we are going to take the opportunity to talk about a very interesting terminal emulator, this emulator unlike others makes use of the GPU to improve the performance and speed of the application on the system.
The application that we are going to talk about today is Alacritty, this application is a terminal emulator that makes use of the GPU to implement optimizations which are simply not possible in other terminal emulators on Linux.
About Alacritty
This application is written in the Rust programming language and uses OpenGL for rendering, this makes the application the fastest terminal emulator available.
This terminal emulator focuses on two goals simplicity and performance. Performance means, it must be faster than any other terminal emulator available. Simplicity means, it does not support functions such as tabs or splits.
Si you want to install this terminal emulator on your system, we must previously have the Rust programming language installed on our systems.
Previous requirements
You can check out the Rust installation method on Linux in the previous post I made, link is this.
Already sure of having this language installed in our system, we have to install some necessary dependencies for the application.
For those who are Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint users or any derivative of these we must open a terminal with ctrl + Alt + T and we will execute the following command:
sudo apt-get install cmake libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev xclip
In the case of CentOS and RHEL users install the dependencies with:
sudo yum install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip
sudo yum group install "Development Tools"
If they are users of Fedora 28 we can install them with this command on the terminal:
sudo dnf install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip
In the case of those who are users of Arch Linux, Manajaro, Antergos or any derivative of Arch we install with:
sudo pacman -S cmake freetype2 fontconfig pkg-config make xclip
Finally, for those who are users of any version of openSUSE:
sudo zypper install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip
You already install the dependenciess we can proceed to install this terminal emuator in our system with any of the following commands.
How to install Alacritty on Linux?
Those who are Arch Linux users and derivatives of it, we can install the application from the AUR repositoriesWe only have to have an assistant for it.
In this case we are going to use aurman, the command to install the terminal emulator is as follows:
aurman- S alacritty
While for those who are openSUSE users we can install the application on the system with the following command:
sudo zypper install alacritty
We can make use of this same package they offer for openSUSE for Fedora, CentOS, RHEL or any distribution with support for rpm packages.
We only download with the following command, to those using a 64-bit system:
wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Factory/standard/x86_64/alacritty-0.1.0-2.2.x86_64.rpm -O alacritty.rpm
For those who they use a 32-bit system:
wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Factory/standard/i586/alacritty-0.1.0-2.2.i586.rpm -O alacritty.rpm
And we install with:
sudo dnf install alacritty.rpm
To The rest of the distributions must download and compile the source code in order to install the application.
Esto We do it in the following way, we must type:
cd Downloads
git clone https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty.git
cd alacritty
cargo build --release
Once this is done, we must copy the binary to our PATH and create the direct access, that is we do it with the following commands:
cp target/release/alacritty /usr/local/bin
cp Alacritty.desktop ~/.local/share/applications
gzip -c alacritty.man | sudo tee /usr/local/share/man/man1/alacritty.1.gz > /dev/null
Y finally We add the necessary settings to our Shell, for Bash:
cp alacritty-completions.bash ~ / .alacritty
sudo echo "source ~/.alacritty" >> ~/.bashrc
For ZSH
cp alacritty-completions.zsh /usr/share/zsh/functions/Completion/X/_alacritty
And for FISH
cp alacritty-completions.fish /usr/share/fish/vendor_completions.d/alacritty.fish
And ready with it, we can run the emulator on our system.
Also we can install this terminal emulator from Snap, even though the package is not official. For those who prefer this method, we only have to type:
sudo snap install alacritty-unofficial --channel