Skip to content
  • Gigadoc 2's avatar
    switch from konsole to alacritty and termite · 832f904c
    Gigadoc 2 authored
    Konsole is still very nice, but QTs font rendering for OTF just looks
    wrong. I initially wanted to switch to kitty, but kitty has no subpixel
    rendering at all, making filigree fonts looking grainy and incomplete.
    The stable version of alacritty first failed to run natively on sway at
    all, and it is reported to focus on "line speed" over typing latency and
    have other issues, so I went for termite first, as it appeared to be the
    most lightweight terminal that runs natively on Wayland with acceptable
    font rendering and plenty of supported escape codes.
    I then tried the current git master of alacritty, which does work
    natively on sway. Despite what is said about it, the percieved latency
    from hitting a key to it showing up on the screen seems lower than what
    termite has to offer. The dynamic_padding feature is really
    aesthetically pleasing as well. There are some missing pieces though,
    most importantly a scrollback search (or export, like kitty has), the
    atrocious rendering of box drawing characters (apparently all
    overlapping characters in general) and hyperlink escape code
    recognition. Most of that is going to be fixed eventually, though the
    devs are not planning on having alacritty take over rendering boxes, so
    fancy prompts and htop are probably never going to look as nice as on
    the other terminal emulators. Memory usage also seems to be very high
    with alacritty, probably because of the GPU-accelerated scrollback.
    I will try running alacritty as the default for now, but am prepared to
    switch to termite should the issues become too annoying.
    832f904c