Alacritty is a fast GPU powered terminal emulator for Windows, macOS, BSD and Linux. It is designed to focus on two things – performance and simplicity. Mainly designed to work in *nix environments, it has been ported for Windows too but lacks many features that are present in the *nix counterparts.
Under a Windows system, you can install Alacritty using many different ways – through Chocolatey application manager, through scoop or through the installer available from Alacritty’s GitHub page. It is also available as a portable binary program that does not require any installation if you have all the Microsoft Visual C++ libraries already installed.
When you launch Alacritty in your Windows PC, you will notice that is just running Microsoft PowerShell inside it. This is why through Alacritty, you will have access to the full PowerShell command set and you can launch all of your PowerShell scripts through it. But this shell can easily be changed through the configuration file.
New versions of Alacritty do not come with a configuration file, but this file can either be created by the user or a sample configuration file can be downloaded from the GitHub page for the project. For Windows, you have to place this alacritty.yml file in the folder %AppData%\alacritty\.
By default, Alacritty uses PowerShell, but you can make it use any other shell you want. For this inside the alacritty.yml file, you have to uncomment and change shell/program to the shell binary. For example, in the following example, we have changed it to use cmd.exe:
In the configuration, you can customize Alacritty’s appearance, background colors, foreground colors, opacity, fonts, cursor, mouse, keyboard bindings, and many more things. Alacritty can be used as a fast replacement terminal by the professionals who have to work with terminal everyday at work.
You can download Alacritty from https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/releases.