Comment by homebrewer
2 days ago
> I think alacritty is better
Can I ask why? It starts slower (has a significant lag on old hardware), has way less useful features (like tabs), has the same responsiveness, and loses in benchmarks (for what they're worth). I see no reason to use it when kitty/ghostty/konsole/foot exist (depending on one's preferences), but people obviously do.
This is incorrect: Alacritty does not have significant lag on old hardware. I suspect you actually meant "hardware that does not have (what is colloquially called) 3D acceleration".
That said, I agree with Terminal elitism being weird: as long as a terminal implements truecolor, both leonerd's and kitty's input protocols, undercurl, OSC52, and maybe OSC8, and otherwise isn't weirdly broken, its good enough.
On that list, alacritty, wez, kitty, foot, WT, anything that uses libvterm, and maybe Ghostty (last time I looked at it, it was just trying to look cool, not being an actually fully implemented terminal, but people swear by it now). Also, multiplexers that implement these requires are on the good enough list, such as tmux or zellij, but not screen (screen tries to pass unknown sequences through, but still sometimes mangles them by accident).
Things that are not required to be on the good enough list: tabs and split panes and any sort of menu bar. These are not show stoppers that prevent compatibility with terminal programs.
Reloading the config is great and it uses a lot less CPU than kitty on my system when the terminal is constantly being updated. Startup doesn't matter to me as I always have tons of terminals open.
It is written in a memory safe and date race safe language.