Alacritty (Part 2)

In my blog entry on GNOME Terminal this morning, I wrote that Alacritty cannot use different configuration for different terminals because configuration changes immediately apply to all terminals. Not long after writing that, I had an idea/realization that I may be able to specify a configuration file to use on the command line. Also, a friend emailed to let me know about a configuration option that I had missed.

Per Terminal Configuration

The alacritty command does indeed have a --config-file option. You can keep your usual configuration in alacritty.yml so that it is used by default, and you can put special configuration in other files. For example, I now have a alacritty-present.yml configuration file that configures the terminal for presentations using a projector. I use the following command to open a terminal using this configuration file.

alacritty --config-file ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty-present.yml

You can of course put this command into a script or configure a hotkey to run it. Note that spawning a new instance using the SpawnNewInstance action spawns a new instance using the same configuration (not the default). Great!

Alacritty configuration has import functionality, which you can use to avoid duplicating common configuration. In my case, I put my full configuration in alacritty.yml. My alacritty-present.yml configuration file imports alacritty.yml and then specifies the settings that are different, overriding my default settings. I really like the design.

This functionality gives me most of what I like about GNOME Terminal profiles. The only thing missing is the ability to change the configuration of a terminal that is already open, with existing content. For this reason, I still wish for an action to change the color scheme.

Live Configuration Reloading

Thank you very much to Chris Horn for pointing out the live_config_reload option! Setting this option to false turns off the automatic application of configuration changes.

# Live config reload (changes require restart)
#live_config_reload: true

Since I now have a good way to run terminals with different configuration, I will keep this setting set to true. I really like the immediate feedback provided by live reloading. Thanks to this feature, Alacritty is easier to configure than any other terminal emulator that I have tried!