 I've been a desktop Linux user for about 13 years now, it's been the only operating system I've used since around 2008. And in those years, I have distro hopped many times, hundreds of times probably. And I've window manager hopped dozens of times. And I've also terminal emulator hopped dozens of times. I've always been searching for the perfect terminal emulator. So I've tried out most everything out there, all the popular choices. And one of the ones that I used for a while was termite. Termite was really the new hot terminal emulator that appeared on the scene a few years ago. I would say about five years ago it really started gaining popularity because people were looking for an alternative to, at the time, Xterm and URX-VT. Xterm and URX-VT had always been the standard terminal emulators, light, minimal, fast terminal emulators to use, especially on window manager only systems. So you didn't want to use the GNOME terminal or KDE's console because they had dependency issues and also they had performance issues compared to things like Xterm and URX-VT. Well termite came out and termite was really good. Termite looked good. It had good performance and it had a really easy config file that had a lot of options in it. It was a lot easier to configure than fooling with the X-Resources file which is how you configured both Xterm and URX-VT. So I actually ran termite for a while and it was fantastic. I really didn't have a reason to actually move off of termite. The only reason I moved off of termite was to explore some other terminal emulators and in my exploration I found Alacrity, which Alacrity has kind of become my terminal emulator. My searching now is over. I don't ever plan to move off of Alacrity because it just, it really gets everything right. It is extremely fast, you know, very good performance with Alacrity. Now it's hardware based, it does GPU acceleration. So I know some people can't use Alacrity because there are pieces of hardware out there. You know, there are computers and laptops out there that Alacrity doesn't run right on. So I know it is dependent on hardware but on all of my machines, Alacrity is fantastic. So that's why I'm using Alacrity these days rather than termite. But I still like termite. Termite though, because it gained such popularity a few years ago, termite is actually the default terminal emulator on a number of Linux distributions out there. I believe termite is actually the default terminal emulator on many of the versions of ARCO Linux. Now the problem with this is that termite now is officially dead. The maintainer of termite has made the GitHub repository read only and he's telling everybody to go and use Alacrity rather than termite. So he actually updated the readme yesterday. You can see readme and he has a comment here for the commit message is termite is dead use Alacrity and he actually made a massive edit to the readme where he explains exactly what is happening and I'll read a little bit of this. He titled this heading here, termite is obsolete by Alacrity. You should use Alacrity instead of termite. It has a keyboard based selection mode inspired by termite and Alacrity 0.8 adds a generic regex hints mode comparable to termites URL hints mode yada yada yada he's saying a lot of the cool features you like in termite. They already exist in this other terminal emulator called Alacrity. He also goes on to say that if you're using, you know, tiling window managers like i3, you know, you're looking for a good terminal emulator and you like to termite, you know, you're going to love Alacrity. He also talks about Alacrity being much faster than termite. This is the guy that maintained termite. He's saying, Hey, you know what? Alacrity just performs better than termite anyway. He talks about Alacrity being written in rust. He also talks about the fact that termite is VTE based now VTE is a terminal widget library that is maintained by the GNOME guys. It's basically the widget library that the GNOME terminal uses. So they have this VTE library and there's some APIs to it. And that's what a lot of other terminal emulators actually use VTE, including termite. But the problem that the maintainer of termite mentions is that the, you know, trying to work with some of the GNOME devs was challenging because he wanted things out of VTE that he just couldn't make work or he was asking the GNOME devs to fix certain things and they wouldn't fix certain things. Let me just read this, this third paragraph here. We strongly recommend against trying to continue the development of termite with a fork. So he's saying, don't fork it. Don't try to keep this thing alive. It goes on to say you should contribute to Alacrity instead. VTE is a terrible base for building a modern fast and safe terminal emulator. So he's talking about the VTE widget library. It's slow. It's brittle. It's difficult to improve. VTE is treated as simply being the GNOME terminal widget rather than a library truly intended to be useful to others. So he's saying, hey, the GNOME guys, they're maintaining that library, but they're maintaining it really for the GNOME terminal. They're not interested in helping anybody else that wants to use that library. And he goes on to say they've gone out of their way to keep the useful APIs private due to hostility towards implementing any kind of user interface beyond what they provide. In 2012, we submitted a tiny patch exposing the APIs needed for the keyboard selection, hence mode and other features. So he links to, I guess, this issue that he opened in 2012. This patch here. And it was rejected. And some of the things that he wanted to do with VTE, I guess they rejected. They marked it as won't fix. So this was nine years ago. Nine years ago. He's been trying to get some of this stuff done. Moving further, he goes, quote, it's now almost a decade later and no progress has been made. There's no implementation of these kinds of features in VTE. And it's unlikely they'll be provided either internally or as flexible APIs. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their hostility toward other projects using VTE as a library. So he's really complaining about the GNOME project. He says GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use. So that is a rather a scathing indictment about the GNOME project, which we've heard these kinds of complaints about GNOME before. We know that there's a lot of really nasty people that work on various GNOME projects. Now, I know a lot of you guys probably are using the termite terminal emulator. So what should you guys do? Well, just because the project is dead doesn't mean the terminal emulator just stops working, right? You can keep using termite. The problem is it's not going to receive any kind of bug fixes, security fixes and things like that. So you probably should be exploring other options. And honestly, if you haven't checked out Alacrity, the termite dev is right. Termite and Alacrity, they're actually rather similar as far as, you know, like the philosophy behind those terminal emulators. And I think you'll end up liking Alacrity more than you like termite. Assuming your hardware supports Alacrity because Alacrity is GPU accelerated, which means if you've got some hardware that supports Alacrity, Alacrity is going to be much faster than termite. Now, in most things you're doing in the terminal, you really can't tell the difference in speed between one terminal emulator and another. But when you're doing really intensive stuff, you know, compiling software and things like that or, you know, outputting a million lines of something, speed really matters on stuff like that. And you can tell a big difference between termite and Alacrity on some of those kinds of performance tests. So I recommend you guys check out Alacrity. You could also check out Kitty, which is similar to Alacrity. It's GPU accelerated and it's a nice terminal emulator, but it's going to have the same problems. You know, if Alacrity doesn't work for you, chances are Kitty's not going to work for you either because both of them are GPU accelerated. So if you've got some kind of weird hardware that Alacrity and Kitty, neither one of those work on, then honestly, I would probably recommend the Suclas ST terminal, the simple terminal that is provided by Suclas. It's actually a pretty good terminal emulator. You do have to patch it a little bit for some basic functionality, but the patching isn't that difficult. And once you have ST patched, it's a pretty dang good terminal emulator. For those of you that are running Linux distributions that ship with Termite out of the box, maybe Termite's the default terminal emulator on the system. I strongly recommend you guys go tell the maintainers of your Linux distributions that Termite is dead and they probably need to start exploring other options now, you know, so that in upcoming releases of their distributions, maybe they'll move to Alacrity or some other terminal emulator that is actually being actively developed. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Absie, Dallas, Gabe, Lou, Mitchell, Alan, Akami, Archvictor by 30 Chuck, David, the other David Dillon, Gregory Lewis, Paul, Polytech, Scott, Steven, Sven, Wes, and Willie. They are the producers of this episode without these guys. This episode you just watched about Termite being dead. It wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by the community. I ask for your support. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Rest in peace, Termite.