Alacritty

Alacritty has come a long way since I last tried it! I was worried that I would have to do without some features if I switched to it, but it now supports all of the features that I want most. I think I will switch, even on my daily driver.

Alacritty font support is very good. I was able to configure my preferred font with a font offset to decrease the amount of spacing in between characters. Japanese looks great! Sometimes a Japanese character will leave an artifact when the terminal scrolls when using rxvt-unicode, but I have not seen that issue with Alacritty. Great!

I use hotkeys in rxvt-unicode to be able to change the font size used in each terminal. For example, I can use a smaller font when I edit a file that has really long lines, and I can use a larger font when more than one person is looking at the screen. I have four convenient font sizes configured. With Alacritty, there are DecreaseFontSize and IncreaseFontSize commands! This allows me to dynamically adjust the font size to the optimal size for each case. Nice!

One behavior in Alacritty that is different from other terminal emulators that I have tried is the effect of using clear to clear the screen. In other terminal emulators, including rxvt-unicode, the clear command clears the terminal, moving the prompt to the top line, but it does not clear the scrollback buffer. With Alacritty, the scrollback buffer is cleared as well! This might take some time to get used to.

One Alacritty feature that I really like is the immediate application of configuration changes. Whenever I save the alacritty.yml configuration file, any changes are immediately visible in all open Alacritty terminals! This is particularly useful when adjusting the color settings.