nix VS alacritty

If we drop std Rust ceases to be economical due to the time it would take to reimplement the data structures and IO interfaces it provides, not to mention the event loop crate we use (calloop). At that point we'd be relying on so much FFI via eg. nix that the relative safety would be diminished too. After reimplementing all that it's not clear to me that we'd even save that much size, but I suppose it's possible.

Now that we have covered the fundamentals of signals, let's delve into the world of handling signals in Rust! Unlike C, where signal handling is built into the language modules, Rust provides several libraries that enable developers to handle signals with ease. Libraries such as signal_hook, nix, libc, and tokio handle signals that primarily use C bindings to make it possible to work with signals.

Obviously you meant the nix crate

Finally, there's the nix crate, which provides a safe Rust API over the libc functions.

You can take a look here for example: https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Unsafe code can in principle speed up I/O by calling libc for special syscalls, but uutils typically uses safe wrappers from nix instead. Very rarely there's a line of unsafe code needed to sand off the edges.

This post fails to speak to me on two fronts:

* The `nix` crate is a cornerstone of the Rust development ecosystem: if you do anything that requires POSIX or various nix-specific APIs beyond those wrapped by the standard library, then `nix` most likely provides a high-level and safe* wrapper for them. Perfectionism is a virtue in this context, one that keeps large parts of the Rust ecosystem from accidentally consuming buggy code. The author unfortunately chose a particularly messy and bug-prone corner of the POSIX APIs to wrap, and ran into a correspondingly intensive review process. I've merged simpler wrappers[1][2] with no fuss.

* Alacritty seems to work just fine. I switched to it about two months ago, after using nothing but (heavily customized) rxvt-unicode for a decade. Maybe it's because I don't use ligatures or images in my terminals (I thought we were talking about non-"toy" functionality!), but I haven't found myself wanting for anything beyond what Alacritty already does. And the scrollback seems to work nicely. To summarize: where's the tragedy?

[1]: https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/pull/1342

[2]: https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/pull/1331

One thing I'd like to see is a MSRV policy, as its causing problems for downstreams (https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/issues/1555)

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.

alacritty (Linux, Macos & Windows)

> 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

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`)

# 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

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

A decent terminal application (i.e: iterm2, alacritty, etc.)

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

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