Alacritty

Alacritty is a modern terminal emulator written in Rust with a strong focus on performance and simplicity. Created by Joe Wilm (initially at Mozilla) and now maintained by the Alacritty community, it has over 57,000 stars as of 2026. Alacritty uses GPU-accelerated rendering via OpenGL (cross-platform) or Metal (macOS), enabling it to handle thousands of lines of terminal output per second without perceptible lag. Unlike traditional terminal emulators that render text on the CPU, Alacritty treats the terminal as a GPU rendering problem, maintaining a grid of glyphs that can be updated and rendered in a single draw call per frame. Key features include: Vi mode for keyboard-driven cursor movement and text selection (with regex search, word selection, line selection, and yank to clipboard), configurable keyboard shortcuts via YAML configuration (including key bindings for all modifier combinations), true color (24-bit) support with configurable cursor style (block, beam, underline), font configuration (family, size, style, offset, glyph offset, with fallback fonts), custom colors for the 16 ANSI colors plus foreground, background, and cursor colors, scrollback buffer with configurable size and multi-line wrapping, multi-window support with tabs and splits (via tmux or Zellij integration), semantic escape characters for word selection, working directory persistence across restarts, and live configuration reload (changes to alacritty.yml are applied without restarting). Alacritty intentionally does not include tabs, splits, or tabs, instead integrating with terminal multiplexers like tmux and Zellij.