Most Unix-based distros come with their flavor of the terminal emulator app, i.e. Terminal in macOS, gnome-terminal in Ubuntu, Terminator in Manjaro, and so on. I've been using Alacritty for a while now, it's a "blazingly fast" terminal emulator app written in Rust with tons of customization options. Let's set it up.

• Install Alacritty for your OS of choice from their GitHub Repository.

  • Prerequisites - Installing Rust (using rustup.rs), os-specific dependencies

• Create a folder named alacritty in the $HOME/.config directory.

    mkdir -p ~/.config/alacritty
  

• Create an alacritty.yml config file inside the alacritty folder with the following content. The location should be $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml. This is a minimal version, the full list of configs can be found in their repository.

    # makes config change effects instant 
    live_config_reload: true
    # styles for the window
    window:
      dimensions:
        columns: 120
        lines: 36
      opacity: 0.98
      padding:
        x: 12
        y: 10
      dynamic_padding: false
      decoration: none
      decorations_theme_variant: Dark
    # font setup for the terminal
    # use Nerd font for better unicode support.
    # https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads
    font:
      normal:
        family: "MesloLGS NF"
        style: Regular
      size: 12
    # cursor styles
    cursor:
      style:
        shape: Beam
        blinking: On
    # some utilites
    save_to_clipboard: true
    draw_bold_text_with_bright_colors: true
  

• Install a theme of your choice following the instructions in the alacritty-theme repo. The one in the screenshot below is the dracula theme.

• Bonus Tip for Ubuntu Gnome: In Ubuntu gnome (the default Ubuntu variant), Ctrl + Alt + T opens the default terminal. If you want to change the default terminal to Alacritty,

  • Go to Settings > Keyboard > View and Customize Shortcuts and search for Terminal. There should be an entry under Launchers, named Launch Terminal. Click on it, and press backspace. This will disable this shortcut and the Ctrl + Alt + T the combination is now free to use for custom shortcuts.

  • At the end of the previous shortcut list, there's an option named Custom Shortcuts. Click on it, and on the next page, click the + icon. This will show a prompt for a new keyboard shortcut, fill in the name as you like and use the cleared shortcut combination. The command value here is alacritty.

With these configs in place, start a new session of alacritty, the terminal should look something like this 👇

That's all for setting up a terminal emulator! Check out the previous post in this series to set up zsh shell with some goodies, and the next post for setting up nvim for joining the IDE masterrace! Peace ✌️