Alacritty gets scrollback, publishes benchmarks (opens in new tab)

"miss the point" feels a bit strong. Rather, I get the impression Alacritty's values don't match your own values in a terminal emulator, and that's totally OK. Historically, input latency hasn't been considered a big pain point by most users.

That said, we do have a plan[1] to address this issue and be both high throughput _and_ low-latency.

[1]: https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/673

The hardest part about supporting things like this on macOS is that they often require a lot of additional code or a certain design whereas on Linux, a lot of these features are provided by the window manager.

I don't consider it contrary to the project's goals if it's something that can be done unobtrusively. Given your description, it sounds like this may be something we could support easily. I filed #1544 to track this. Thanks for the suggestion!

#1544: https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/1544

Thanks for this feedback! We haven't heard a ton of complaints about the input latency, and comments like this help us to prioritize issues. This has been mentioned in two discussions today, so perhaps it's time to address this.

If you want notifications on any developments here, please subscribe to this GitHub issue: https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/673

Not so much a question, but I wanted to thank you for the project. It's hit a sweet spot of configurability, stability, and performance for me, all without the baggage or caveats alternatives have. It's been my terminal of choice for a while now. Keep up the good work.

How did you choose the terminals to benchmark against? What about xterm or gnome-terminal or powershell or whatever?

I hate the moment when I lose something in history so I've set my xfce4-terminal to 250k lines which was always enough so I've tried to set scrollback history to that number. Alacritty allocated 1.4GBs during startup while Xfce can keep it within 20MBs. Any plans to allocate memory a bit less aggressively if such high number is used? Sure, without scrollbar it's kinda pointless anyway but when it gets implemented it can be useful. Thank you

Thank you very much. It's a delightful experience I have on all my machines.

Thanks for the updates! I'm compiling it now...

Performance is never a bad thing, even if I don't always need my terminal emulator to be able to handle large amounts of text, there is nothing wrong with having a light weight high performance (eventually cross platform, hopefully) modern terminal emulator. I read a while back that implementing the same in iterm2 (a popular macOS only terminal emulator) is challenging due to past design decisions [0]. Certainly in a time where hyper terminal[1] (based on electron) exists, I see no downside to having the option of Alacritty.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17635869 [1] https://hyper.is/