st VS alacritty

Compare st vs alacritty and see what are their differences.

st

build of the suckless simple terminal with patches for alpha, font2, copyurl, openclipboard, invert, appsync, xresources, scrollback, w3m, keyboard select, boxdraw (by mrdotx)
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st alacritty
46 352
8 52,639
- 2.2%
5.7 9.3
21 days ago 7 days ago
C Rust
MIT License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

st

Posts with mentions or reviews of st. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-06.
  • Autodafe: "freeing your freeing your project from the clammy grip of autotools."
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Apr 2024
    > you need to "edit your makefile". That isn't going to work for distributions

    Is it not? [st] requires exactly that. And distros seem to have no issues shipping it.

    [st] https://st.suckless.org/

  • Tabby: A terminal for a more modern age
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jul 2023
    I am fundamentally and ideologically opposed to using a terminal emulator implemented in electron.

    If you feel similarly, then you might enjoy https://st.suckless.org/

  • How to make simple terminal transparent
    1 project | /r/archlinux | 26 Jun 2023
    You can use different forks of the ST. I, for example, use this one, already with the necessary patches https://github.com/mrdotx/st
  • [sowm] My first time using linux!
    5 projects | /r/unixart | 19 Jun 2023
    kiss with kiss-xorg, nsxiv, st, dmenu with script, tewi, fet.sh
  • Warp? A terminal behind login popup
    6 projects | dev.to | 1 Jun 2023
    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 emulators, each offering its unique features (or similar however with each with personal touch), user interfaces, and performance benchmarks. Just the other day, a new terminal emulator caught my attention: Warp Terminal. My curiosity won, and Warp was downloaded, this short blog are my thoughts about Warp terminal. At the moment there is only support for macOS, however linux and windows builds are on the way.
  • [dwm] Beginning on linux desktop, first ricing
    12 projects | /r/suckless | 7 May 2023
    Terminal : st
  • XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought (2021)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Apr 2023
    For those looking for a minimal VT100 terminal emulator without the legacy baggage of Xterm, I highly recommend checking out Suckless Software’s st: https://st.suckless.org/
  • circles.nvim - v2.0.1
    4 projects | /r/neovim | 21 Mar 2023
    That last reference builds off of the work of the other two. It also breaks down how NOT modern Xterm is, but, if I've read it correctly, it confirms that its input latency is low compared to all other tested terminal emulators, including Alacritty and ST, which humorously and justifiably thrashes Xterm on its homepage for being a bloated program. Its not a good choice for everyone: it has poor right-to-left text and Unicode support, making working with Chinese, Arabic, and other alphabets not great, I've read.
  • Are there any resources you would recommend for someone trying to make a terminal emulator in C and x11?
    1 project | /r/C_Programming | 18 Mar 2023
  • Which terminal do you usually use?
    8 projects | /r/archlinux | 1 Mar 2023
    ST is a favorite of some fervent minimalists. I do not think you would like it.

alacritty

Posts with mentions or reviews of alacritty. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-16.
  • Terminal Latency
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Mar 2024
    It's opinionated, which comes with upsides and downsides. I won't blame the maintainer to keep things focused, feature creep (even for worthy features) can kill a FOSS project.

    Another example is sixel support, there's a fork where it all works but is not sufficiently "proven" (code quality just as well as sixel being the best fit for the problem)

    https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/pull/4763#issuecommen...

    It may be annoying but I get the reasoning, and there are other terminals.

  • Level Up Your Dev Workflow: Conquer Web Development with a Blazing Fast Neovim Setup (Part 1)
    12 projects | dev.to | 16 Mar 2024
    alacritty (Linux, Macos & Windows)
  • Alacritty: A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Feb 2024
  • Neovide – a simple, no-nonsense, cross-platform GUI for Neovim
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jan 2024
    > Ligatures: ok, nice, possible in terms too (hopefully Alacritty one day)

    I wouldn't hold my breath. Seems like its getting the iPad calculator treatment[0]. Which is to say rather than ship something working that can be improved, they're leaving a UX void.

    [0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/50

  • I Just Wanted Emacs to Look Nice – Using 24-Bit Color in Terminals
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2024
    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)

    My daily driver is WezTerm…

    - Runs on Linux, macOS, Windows 10 and FreeBSD

    - [Multiplex terminal panes, tabs and windows on local and remote hosts, with native mouse and scrollback](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html)

    - [Ligatures](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#fira-code-monospaced-font...), Color Emoji and font fallback, with true color and [dynamic color schemes](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/appearance.html#colors).

    - [Hyperlinks](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/hyperlinks.html)

    - [Searchable Scrollback](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/scrollback.html) (use mouse wheel and `Shift-PageUp` and `Shift PageDown` to navigate, Ctrl-Shift-F to activate search mode)

    - xterm style selection of text with mouse; paste selection via `Shift-Insert` (bracketed paste is supported!)

    - SGR style mouse reporting (works in vim and tmux)

    - Render underline, double-underline, italic, bold, strikethrough (most other terminal emulators do not support as many render attributes)

    - Configuration via a [configuration file](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/files.html) with hot reloading

    - Multiple Windows (Hotkey: `Super-N`)

    - Splits/Panes (Split horizontally/vertically: `Ctrl-Shift-Alt-%` and `Ctrl-Shift-Alt-"`, move between panes: `Ctrl-Shift-ArrowKey`)

    - Tabs (Hotkey: `Super-T`, next/prev: `Super-Shift-[` and `Super-Shift-]`, go-to: `Super-[1-9]`)

    - [SSH client with native tabs](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/ssh.html)

    - [Connect to serial ports for embedded/Arduino work](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/serial.html)

    - Connect to a local multiplexer server over unix domain sockets

    - Connect to a remote multiplexer using SSH or TLS over TCP/IP

    - iTerm2 compatible image protocol support, and built-in [imgcat command](https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/imgcat.html)

    - Kitty graphics support

    - Sixel graphics support (experimental: starting in `20200620-160318-e00b076c`)

  • alacritty-themes not working any more!!!
    6 projects | dev.to | 7 Jan 2024
    # 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
  • The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Dec 2023
    if by 'in the terminal' you mean 'in a program emulating an ascii terminal' then no, because ascii terminals don't support anything that looks better than ascii art. they don't support sixel either. there are a variety of proposals for how to add graphics to ascii terminal emulators in a backwards-compatible way, such as mgr and notty https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/51

    but the 'terminal' that a terminal emulator is emulating is a device which provides a user access to a remote computer. normally nowadays this is a laptop or cellphone. in that case, yes, you can use x-windows, xpra, vnc, or a web browser

  • Pimp your CLI
    13 projects | dev.to | 19 Dec 2023
    A decent terminal application (i.e: iterm2, alacritty, etc.)
  • What GPU Accelerated terminal do you recommend for Linux
    1 project | /r/neovim | 11 Dec 2023
    I have been having random input lags with Alacritty. Initially I thought it was my custom neovim config. After some investigation, I have found an Alacritty github issue where users are reporting the same issue: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6844
  • Keypress delay
    1 project | /r/neovim | 11 Dec 2023
    Thank you for your suggestions. I have now narrow it down to my terminal emulator. Alacritty. More precisely this issue: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6844

What are some alternatives?

When comparing st and alacritty you can also consider the following projects:

kitty - Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal

tmux-powerline - ⚡️ A tmux plugin giving you a hackable status bar consisting of dynamic & beautiful looking powerline segments, written purely in bash.

wezterm - A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written by @wez and implemented in Rust

termite - Termite is obsoleted by Alacritty. Termite was a keyboard-centric VTE-based terminal, aimed at use within a window manager with tiling and/or tabbing support.

Warp - Warp is a modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in so you and your team can build great software, faster.

st-flexipatch - An st build with preprocessor directives to decide which patches to include during build time

starship - ☄🌌️ The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

libxft-bgra - A patched version of libxft that allows for colored emojis to be rendered in Suckless software (dmenu/st/whatever).

FiraCode - Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

hyperterm - A terminal built on web technologies

neofetch - 🖼️ A command-line system information tool written in bash 3.2+