Software Alternatives & Reviews

xterm VS Alacritty

Compare xterm VS Alacritty and see what are their differences

xterm logo xterm

You can download and use MobaXterm Home Edition for free.

Alacritty logo Alacritty

Alacritty is a blazing fast, GPU accelerated terminal emulator.
  • xterm Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-17
  • Alacritty Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-01

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Alacritty videos

Alacritty vs iTerm vs Terminal vs Hyper

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to xterm and Alacritty)
SSH
28 28%
72% 72
Server Management
32 32%
68% 68
Terminal Tools
15 15%
85% 85
Development
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare xterm and Alacritty

xterm Reviews

The 10 Best Linux Terminal Emulators
XTERM is the default emulator for the X window system. XTERM is a good choice for minimal Linux installations. Its minimalist approach makes it a good choice among many Linux users.
Top 14 Terminal Emulators for Linux (With Extra Features or Amazing Looks)
XTERM is one of the most popular terminal emulators out there. Even though it might seem to be a bloated option when compared to st, it’s still a decent option that you can try for X Window System.
Source: itsfoss.com

Alacritty Reviews

MobaXterm for Mac: Best Alternatives to MobaXterm for Mac
Alacritty includes some important features and blazing speed to give best performance as a terminal app. It comes with proper default settings, The Alacritty does not require additional setup. You can start using Alacritty right after installation on your Mac.
The 10 Best Linux Terminal Emulators
Alacritty can be considered by some a new kid in the block because of its “beta” phase status. Some features that might be of interest are the ability to click through a URL using a keyboard, perform a search, and copy text to the clipboard. You can also try the Vi search, and search functionality allows you to find anything in the Alacritty scrollback buffer. You can also...
Top 14 Terminal Emulators for Linux (With Extra Features or Amazing Looks)
Alacritty can be installed using package managers says the official GitHub page, but I couldn’t find it in the default repository or synaptic package manager on Linux Mint 20.1.
Source: itsfoss.com
Top 7 Best Linux Terminals
You should be able to find Alacritty in your distribution’s repositories, but you can also download Precompiled binaries from Alacritty’s GitHub releases page. Apart from Linux, Alacritty also runs on Windows, macOS, and *BSD.
Source: linuxhint.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Alacritty seems to be a lot more popular than xterm. While we know about 56 links to Alacritty, we've tracked only 4 mentions of xterm. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

xterm mentions (4)

  • CVE-2022-45063: Xterm
    -- For a better overview, see http://invisible-island.net/xterm/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • A good python library to replace libtcod for terminal play?
    Iterm2, gnome terminal, xterm, Konsole, macos Terminal, powershell, command, etc.. these all provide a common API which we normally use curses to interface with. But all of them basically reach into something lower level (opengl, vulkan, directx, etc.) to render the text, which ultimately is still pixels on a screen. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Convert terminal output to Images
    Xterm has had the ability to make HTML or SVG dumps of the screen since 2016 (patch 323). Source: over 2 years ago
  • What terminal emulator do you use?
    Xterm — Simple terminal emulator for the X Window System. It provides DEC VT102 and Tektronix 4014 compatible terminals for programs that cannot use the window system directly https://invisible-island.net/xterm/. Source: about 3 years ago

Alacritty mentions (56)

  • I Just Wanted Emacs to Look Nice – Using 24-Bit Color in Terminals
    IME, this is like the golden age of terminal apps in general and macOS-compatible ones in particular. There are several really good terminals for macOS: [iTerm2 app](https://iterm2.com/) [Kitty terminal](https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) [WezTerm terminal](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/index.html) [Alacritty](https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty) -... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • alacritty-themes not working any more!!!
    # We use Alacritty's default Linux config directory as our storage location here. Mkdir -p ~/.config/alacritty/themes Git clone https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty-theme ~/.config/alacritty/themes. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • what terminal emulator do you use and why?
    For this reason, and because I think the Zellij project is interesting, I currently use a combination of Alacritty and Zellij, as I consider the risk of OSC52 in my use case to be relatively low. Source: 5 months ago
  • Which terminal do you use? I don't like Warp
    I personally love using Alacritty. Super fast, and no bloat. Takes a little bit of setup such as setting up a Font if you want icons to appear. Kitty is supposed to be really good, but I've never used it before. Source: 10 months ago
  • Warp? A terminal behind login popup
    My journey of using terminal emulators began together with my introduction to Linux about 7 years ago. GNOME terminal was my first as it came pre-installed on Ubuntu, my first Linux distribution. Since then, I've had the opportunity to explore and utilize a range of terminal emulators, including Alacritty, Kitty, st, Konsole, xterm, and most recently iTerm2. It's been interesting to experiment with these different... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing xterm and Alacritty, you can also consider the following products

Konsole - Konsole is a free terminal emulator which is part of KDE Software Compilation.

tmux - tmux is a terminal multiplexer: it enables a number of terminals (or windows), each running a...

GNOME Terminal - GNOME Terminal is a terminal emulator for GNOME desktop.

iTerm2 - A terminal emulator for macOS that does amazing things.

Gnome Terminator - Terminator is one of the most useful and dynamic terminal emulators for Unix based operating systems.

wezterm - GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer made with Rust.