what's good about alacritty? i admittedly know jack shit about why one would choose a different terminal emulator and mostly used the default one, then used kitty for a while for no particular reason except that i liked the name, i knew people who used it and i knew the guy created calibre, which is a software i often used at the time so i used it, although i have since heard he is an asshole or something? do some of them have default keybindings that make things easier to use or something? or do people use diff emulators to reduce bloat or something adjacent to that?
terminal emulator preference is mostly about features, your DE/WM, and how you prefer to customise stuff.
i really liked kitty and originally picked it partly for the name and modern features:
multiple terminals on a single 'instance' - reducing memory overhead
glyph/emoji/ligature support
it's also highly configurable and the configuration options are well-documented.
however, i ran into a ton of small issues:
kitty w/ TERM=xterm-kitty ironically causes more issues processing certain key combos and escape codes than setting it to xterm-256color (not officially supported in kitty)
the dev is aware of TERM=xterm-kitty issues but won't fix them
alacritty uses TERM=alacritty and works fine
kitty bugs out when running neovim inside a dtach session via my resnvim.py wrapper script; alacritty and xterm have no such issues
kitty also bugs out when sending neovim files/commands via --remote and --remote-send while alacritty and xterm are fine
the dev considers multiplexers like tmux a "horrible hack" and is uninterested in supporting them inside kitty
he's also uninterested in adding tmux-style sessions (despite kitty having the other main feature of tmux: splits and tabs)
he's not as hostile as the hyprland devs, but kitty is feature-rich, why get mad when people ask for features they use daily in other terminals ?
alacritty, by contrast, has none of these issues. it supports the features i mentioned earlier, is highly configurable, has a native vi mode, supports custom actions for different URL/URI types (again user-configurable and supports regex), and leaves things like tabs and splits up to either a multiplexer like tmux or your window manager. so far, the community and devs don't seem to be hostile (despite it being "suckless"-type software and the suckless community being known for hostility too).
