10 - What is Alacritty and how to use it in macOS

Contents

• YouTube video
• If you like this, and want to support me
• Follow me on Twitter
• What is alacritty and why?
• How do I install alacritty?

YouTube video

If you like this, and want to support me

• I create and edit my videos in an m1 mac mini, and it’s starting to stay behind in the editing side of things, tends to slow me down a bit, I’d like to upgrade the machine I use for all my videos to a mac mini with these specs:
  • Apple M4 Pro chip with 14‑core CPU, 20‑core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
  • 24GB unified memory
  • 1TB SSD storage
  • 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• If you want to help me reach my goal, you can donate here

Discord server

• After following this guide or even watching the related video, you:
  • Have questions related to one of the tools, configs or scripts that I use
  • Would like me to expand a bit more on how something is done
  • Or simply would like to talk and meet other community members that share your same interests
• join the discord server in this link
• Access to the discord server is only for YouTube community members

Follow me on Twitter

• Or as kids call it these days “X”
• Here’s the link

What is alacritty and why?

• Alacritty is a fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
• Why do I use it?
  • I’ve used iTerm for years, and I loved it, but I don’t need all the extra functionality it provides, I don’t need tabs, profiles, arrangements, integrated tmux, etc. I need a terminal that’s simple, and is just a terminal, no addons. If I want to add something, I’ll do it myself
  • Main reason why I switched to Alacritty is because I can save my config in a repo, and easily transfer that configuration to a new machine. No dealing with configuration files that I need to configure in a GUI
  • Another huge reason, is because I can only use iTerm in macos, I want a terminal that I can use in mac, Linux or even Windows, using the same configuration across OSs
  • That’s it, I don’t care if Alacritty is GPU accelerated, maybe I do, but don’t notice the difference

How do I install alacritty?

• If you’re following my youtube playlist 2024 macOS workflow you should have Alacritty installed and configured by now, that guide will also install the required fonts, alacritty themes and all that’s needed, so it’s the simplest way

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• If you’re not following that playlist and you want to install Alacritty on your own run the brew install command below
  • For this, you will need to have brew installed, if you don’t have it installed yet, watch this video

brew install --cask alacritty

• Once you have alacritty installed, you need to edit the config file to modify it to your liking, run these commands to create the Alacritty config directory and files if they don’t exist, if they already exist, nothing happens
• This will open the vim text editor to edit the file, so you have to paste the alacritty configuration found in my github repo (see link below)

mkdir -p ~/.config/alacritty
vim ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml

• Here’s a link to my alacritty configuration file and the rest of my dotfiles
• Once you have pasted the config in the file, save it by typying :wq to “write and quit”
• Quit and re-open Alacritty and that should take care of it