 Hey everybody welcome back to the channel today I'm going to be talking about my time with alacrity now about a month ago I decided I was going to try out alacrity because it's one of those terminals that a lot of people seem to like now this is written in rust so it's kind of a meme to use it and I kind of resisted it for a while because I was such a big fan of termite and then I tried st for a while and st was fine except for the whole patching thing and you know I've just kind of been switching back and forth over the last five or six months between different terminals to see if there's anything that I like better than termite before alacrity I could honestly say that there was definitely not any terminal that I liked better it was simple it didn't have a whole bunch of bells and whistles and I could just you know get my work done or use my programs and apps or whatever and move on I didn't have to spend a lot of time configuring it is what is really what I'm talking about but then I've used alacrity now for a month and I can see a lot of good things about it so I'm going to talk about those good things and I'm also going to talk about a few things that have kind of bothered me about it or maybe not really bothered me about it but more have given me pause on switching to it completely let's go ahead and jump in so the first thing we should take a look at is alacrity itself now this is what I have alacrity looking like it has some transparency because of high com I've done nothing incredibly you know complex or whatever with the layout it has a very nice color scheme to match my new rice for dwm which is good but other than that it's just it's just a terminal it's not much to look at the pros and cons of alacrity that were explained to me over and over again in the comments of my st video where that alacrity is fast and that alacrity has features that are awesome now in my month of using it I will have to say and be honest I've not noticed a huge speed difference between this and termite now I'm going to say that and then I'm going to say this the stuff that I do in the terminal doesn't really stress any terminal out so the time differences for the things that I do in the terminal are negligible because none of them are power intensive none of them are going to say take up all of my gpu power which is supposedly the premier feature of something like alacrity because it can use gpu acceleration or whatever I don't think that I've ever really tapped into that power because my uses for the terminal are fairly simple I do some scripting I use like NC spot I use ranger those are all the things that I do none of them run particularly slow or particularly fast when compared to other terminals that I've used now if I ran something like time you know fetch something like that I could get the time and stuff like that for how long it took to run this I could do the time for you know whatever command that I wanted to do and yes actually having the computer show that time would go through and tell you that alacrity is faster even on the smaller commands than something like termite but it's all a perception thing because really I can't tell a difference between because between 9 milliseconds and 10 milliseconds I mean I really just can't I'm not that perceptive I guess so in terms of speed I really haven't noticed it being that fast now I could see if you do tap into that power of the gpu acceleration I could see that it would actually go through and be a benefit for you and I do apologize for the lawnmower in the background apparently it's spring we're just gonna have to put up with that kind of nonsense um where was I oh speed so like I said I don't I didn't notice a lot of speed but I could like I could see if you're doing things like compiling a lot of code if you're running you know a lot of intensive programming or things like that you'd probably see some of that you know gain that you wouldn't see in like something like termite or st or whatever the other thing that was told to me by the those commenters that I would like about alacrity is the features now let's look at the standard alacrity configuration file this is what that looks like it is 863 lines long now most of them are comments so take that for you know what you will most of those comments are actually kind of like the man page it tells you exactly what it's doing and you can delete all those things and I'll show you my configuration file here in a minute but there are definitely a lot of really cool options that alacrity has too many things really because like I said before my use of a terminal is very simple I don't need all the bells and whistles um for example if we go down here at the bottom to the bottom we can actually see that alacrity has a ton of key bindings it actually has a vim mode which I didn't actually get a chance to try out uh mostly because I didn't really want to go through and learn the key bindings and then just switch away from them because I don't want I didn't want to become reliant on them and then go to a terminal it didn't have those and then I'd you know miss alacrity but this is something that a lot a lot of terminals have in terms of customizability like I think kitty does I'm sure like st does but c is so hard to kind of get a hold of for at least for new users that's kind of hard to you know change those and it's features like these that I just did not get into because I didn't really need them so I think I'm a poor customer for alacrity in terms of feature set because I just don't need all the features that it offers and I don't take advantage of the speed so those two main features that it that supposedly hold it higher than the rest of the terminals out there I don't use so that's the lesson that I've learned over the last month is that I just don't take advantage of how powerful alacrity is now that being said I do like alacrity so there's a couple features that I did really like so for example let me show you my configuration file this is my configuration file and what did I say the alacrity configuration file was 863 lines long mine is 39 long 39 lines long that's really hard to say 39 lines long fuck tongue twisters all I've basically done is taken out all of the comments in the entire default configuration left the colors left the font all I've kept is setting one font because the font family that I use has everything that it needs so I don't actually need to go through and set a separate bold font and I hardly ever use bold fonts in my terminal anyways I don't need italics and none of that stuff so I just have one font set because I have the colors I have some offsets here to actually show this bottom bar which for some reason gets cut off when the font you don't have an offset I have some padding which does the same thing I set this environment thing here which allows some theming things to work properly in them and then I have the the scrolling history that's literally it now one of the things that I really liked about this so I can go through and change something here if I change the text size to 16 and then save this it should go through and actually change the size automatically that's really cool and it's going to be a feature that I miss if I switch away from alacrity because traditionally if you make a change in say like termite let's say if I open up termite here I open up termite and I fit into my .config termite and then this is my termite config and if I made a change to the font size if I made if I changed this to 16 if I wanted that to take effect I have to quit out of that I'd have to quit out of termite open up termite again and then it would have made the change and obviously I didn't make a big enough change to actually show that it was a change but the point is it wasn't live that I mean and really that's the way that most terminals do it you make a change you have to quit the terminal instance and then restart it that's the way it's worked for time in memorial it's just the way it does and the fact that alacrity has changed that and made it so that I can go through and change my configuration file at least the visual parts of it and then have it basically recompile live is really cool I mean I just can't tell you how much I will miss that if I do switch away from it the other thing that I really enjoy about alacrity is the error reporting so if I go through and made an error here I'm not going to make an error but if I've gone through and I've made a mistake like I I've missed an apostrophe or I've mistyped something whatever alacrity will actually go through and tell me what's what I did wrong it'll have an error at the bottom of the screen it will go through and tell you the line that it was on and why it's wrong that's not something you see in a terminal all that much usually when you make a mistake in a terminal configuration file it just defaults back to the default config and you're left wondering why it's doing that I mean obviously you know you've made an error but it's not going to tell you where it's not going to tell you why and those I mean that's a big deal especially if you mess around with the terminal configuration file a lot like it reminds me a lot of the error reporting in i3 when you make a error in i3 it also will bring up a detailed log of what you did wrong tell you where you did the thing wrong and what it was expecting now dwml also does the kind of the same thing it will show you in what file and stuff at compile time but it's not as user facing because you actually have to know to compile those things and know to look for them whereas with something like i3 and in this case alacrity it actually puts up a big red banner saying you have an error you have to fix it I mean that's awesome so those are the two things really that I like the best about alacrity as I said before I didn't really get into the two main selling points of alacrity as much as I probably should have and that's mainly because that's not my use case for a terminal so I guess the bottom line is or the final question is am I going to continue to use alacrity and as of this moment yes I am I have officially made the switch on all my computers to alacrity I still have termite installed it's still my security blanket I guess but I like the auto updating of alacrity so much that it's hard to switch away now I don't make changes to my terminal configuration file often but I love the fact that when I do it updates that live and that just that just that one feature just is amazing I mean it's just so good and like I said if I do someday decide to switch away to go try maybe kitty again or maybe I'd try you know whatever I mean I don't even know if I didn't I know that that's one feature that I would definitely definitely missed so that is it for this video thank you for watching make sure you follow us on twitter at the next cash you can also support us on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast with that in mind I'd like to take a moment to thank our current patrons Devon Marcus Meglin American camp thanks everybody for your support thank you for watching I'll see you next time