Alacritty is a terminal emulator built in Rust with one clear goal: be the fastest terminal available. It offloads rendering to your GPU via OpenGL, which keeps scrolling and high-output commands buttery smooth even with huge amounts of text flying by. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows from a single codebase.
Its philosophy is deliberately minimal—Alacritty doesn't include tabs or splits, leaving that to a multiplexer like tmux. What it does include is rock-solid performance, true color, and a clean YAML/TOML configuration file (~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml) with live reload, so changes apply the moment you save.
# ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml
[font]
size = 12.0
[window]
opacity = 0.95That focus is the trade-off: if you want built-in tabs and rich features, kitty or WezTerm may suit you better. But for raw speed paired with tmux, Alacritty is a favorite among performance-minded users.