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# Alacritty

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Alacritty is a simple, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust. It supports scrollback, 24-bit colors, copy/paste, clicking on URLs, and custom key bindings.

## Installation

Install the alacritty package.

## Configuration

Alacritty searches for a configuration file at the following places in this order:

- `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.toml`
- `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.toml`
- `$HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml`
- `$HOME/.alacritty.toml`

Versions before 0.13.0 used a YAML configuration file. Old YAML config files can be converted to TOML by running `alacritty migrate`. However, automatic migration drops all comments.

Alacritty does not provide a configuration file by default. Configuration options can be found at the project's homepage. If the `live_config_reload` option is enabled (default), most settings will take effect as soon as you save the configuration file.

### Colors

See the alacritty-theme repository for a list of available color schemes. If your preferred color scheme is on the list, paste the provided code into your configuration file.

### Font

If you do not want to use your system’s default font, you can specify a different font by changing the following lines:

    [font]
    size = 12.0

    [font.bold]
    family = "monospace"
    style = "Bold"

    [font.bold_italic]
    family = "monospace"
    style = "Bold Italic"

    [font.italic]
    family = "monospace"
    style = "Italic"

    [font.normal]
    family = "monospace"
    style = "Regular"

Substitute `monospace` with a font name from the output of

    $ fc-list : family style

Note that some fonts do not provide an `Italic` style but an `Oblique` style instead.

## Tips and tricks

### Spawn new instance in same directory

Add the following lines to your configuration file to spawn a new instance of Alacritty in the current working directory by pressing `Ctrl+Shift+Enter`:

    [keyboard]
    bindings = [
       { key = "Return", mods = "Control|Shift", action = "SpawnNewInstance" }
    ]

### Vi mode and copy/paste

The vi mode allows moving around Alacritty's viewport and scrollback using the keyboard. By default, you can toggle it using `Ctrl+Shift+Space`. To copy, you can either use a mouse to select and press `Ctrl+Shift+c`, or enter Vi mode, start a selection using `v`, move around with `hjkl` like in vim, and copy the selection with `y`. To paste, press `Ctrl+Shift+v`. To copy/paste to/from X clipboard, you can use a mouse selection to copy and a middle mouse click to paste.

### Hints

Terminal hints can be used to find text or hyperlinks in the visible part of the terminal and pipe it to other applications. By default, Alacritty provides hinting URLs via the `Ctrl+Shift+O` shortcut and opens them with xdg-open. See the `HINTS` section of Alacritty TOML configuration manual for details.

For example, to make `filename.rs:line:character` file hints (e.g. `my_crate/src/server.rs:181:49`) clickable and open in Visual Studio Code, one can add the following section to Alacritty's TOML config:

    alacritty.toml

    [[hints.enabled]]
    regex = "[^ ]+\\.rs:\\d+:\\d+"
    command = { program = "code", args = [ "--goto" ] }
    mouse = { enabled = true }

Multiple types of regex-based hints can be added by adding multiple `[[hints.enabled]]` sections.

### Switch themes on the fly

If you want to switch the theme, for example when connecting to a server over ssh. The following command can be used:

    $ alacritty msg config "$(cat ~/path/to/theme.toml)"

## Troubleshooting

### Mouse not working properly in Vim

Add `set ttymouse=sgr` and `set mouse=a` to your `.vimrc` or switch to Neovim. Also see this issue.

### Transparent border in dwm

With dwm, alacritty's borders become transparent. Adding this line to `drw.c` in the dwm source directory and recompiling fixes the issue:

    if (!XftColorAllocName(...))
        die("error, cannot allocate color '%s'", clrname); /* Find this line */
    dest->pixel |= 0xff << 24; /* Add this line */

### Terminal functionality unavailable in remote shells

When connecting to a remote system from an Alacritty terminal, for instance over SSH, it can occur that the system does not have an entry for Alacritty in its terminfo database (`/usr/share/terminfo/a/alacritty*`). Therefore, all interactive terminal functionality does not work. This can be fixed either by installing a relevant system package on the server (e.g. ncurses on Arch or ncurses-term on Debian-based distributions), or by copying the terminfo for Alacritty to the remote server, as described in termite#Terminal issues with SSH.

On the local host, using Alacritty:

    $ infocmp > alacritty.terminfo  # export Alacritty's Terminfo
    $ scp alacritty.terminfo user@remote-host:~/  # or any other method to copy to the remote host

On the remote host, in the directory where you copied `alacritty.terminfo`:

    $ tic -x alacritty.terminfo  # import Terminfo for current user
    $ rm alacritty.terminfo  # optional: remove Terminfo file

Here is a one-liner version of the process above:

    $ infocmp | ssh "$user@$host" 'tic -x /dev/stdin'

Note After this, you will need to start a new SSH session to have the remote shell load the new Terminfo.

Alternatively, one can set the value of `TERM` in the configuration to `xterm-256color` instead of the default `alacritty`:

    [env]
    TERM = "xterm-256color"

### No title bar on Wayland GNOME

When using Wayland GNOME, the title bar is empty and has strange icons. See https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/4739 for details.

One workaround is to launch Alacritty with Xwayland instead of native Wayland by setting an empty `WAYLAND_DISPLAY` environment variable.

### Different font size on multiple monitors

By default, Alacritty attempts to scale fonts to the appropriate point size on each monitor based on the `Device pixel ratio`. On some setups with multiple displays, this behavior can result in vastly different physical sizes [1], [2].

To view the existing device pixel ratio values for each monitor, run `alacritty -v`, move the child window to each monitor, and pay attention to the reported `Device pixel ratio` in the parent window.

Forcing a constant device pixel ratio using the `WINIT_X11_SCALE_FACTOR` environment variable may be sufficient to fix the different font size issue:

    $ WINIT_X11_SCALE_FACTOR=1.66 alacritty

This can also be achieved by setting the value of `WINIT_X11_SCALE_FACTOR` in the configuration file:

    [env]
    WINIT_X11_SCALE_FACTOR = "1.66"

### Color scheme not recovering what was previously set with pywal

You can add the following code to your shell's run commands (`.bashrc`).

    if command -v wal > /dev/null 2>&1 && [ "$TERM" = "alacritty" ]; then
        wal -Rqe
    fi

This is better than simply adding `wal -R` because

1. You only need this to happen in your terminal emulator window.
2. `wal -R` is pretty slow and you don't need to run that in every subshell.
3. You don't need to see StdOut, we use the `-q` option.
4. We don't need to cause other parts of our desktop to reload colors again as well (i.e. gtk, xrdb, polybar, i3). This is done with the `-e` flag.

Category:

- Terminal emulators

Alacritty
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