Terminal Emulator
A terminal emulator is essentially the application that you use to interact with your machine. Apple has a Terminal application that is pretty basic and there are better options out there. My top choice recently has been alacritty for a the following reasons:
- Alacritty is crazy fast. I noticed a difference immediately in my workflow
- I use Tmux for all of my tab management, so I didn’t need the feature(s) from iterm2
- Much like Josh Medeski, I have been trying to move to a more minimal setup
- Speaking of minimal, I really love that you can configure Alacritty with a single yaml file
Alacritty config
.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml
env:
TERM: xterm-256color
window:
decorations: buttonless #takes away the top bar
opacity: 0.8 #love that see through look
dynamic_padding: true
padding:
x: 5
y: 5
font:
normal:
family: "SFMono Nerd Font"
style: Medium
italic:
family: "SFMono Nerd Font"
style: Medium Italic
bold:
family: "SFMono Nerd Font"
style: Heavy
bold_italic:
family: "SFMono Nerd Font"
style: Heavy Italic
size: 13
offset:
x: 0
y: 5
glyph_offset:
x: 0
y: 2
AppleFontSmoothing: true
selection:
semantic_escape_chars: ",│`|:\"' ()[]{}<>\t"
save_to_clipboard: true
live_config_reload: true
colors:
primary:
background: "#000000"
foreground: "#ebdbb2"
normal:
black: "#282828"
red: "#cc241d"
green: "#98971a"
yellow: "#d79921"
blue: "#458588"
magenta: "#b16286"
cyan: "#689d6a"
white: "#a89984"
bright:
black: "#928374"
red: "#fb4934"
green: "#b8bb26"
yellow: "#fabd2f"
blue: "#83a598"
magenta: "#d3869b"
cyan: "#8ec07c"
white: "#ebdbb2"
Other options
I used Iterm2 for quite a while and it was great. It has some native support for things like Tabs and Panes, so if you aren’t using tmux, iterm could be a good option