nushell VS alacritty

Compare nushell vs alacritty and see what are their differences.

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nushell alacritty
232 370
35,192 58,847
1.7% 1.1%
9.9 8.6
about 7 hours ago 21 days ago
Rust 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.

nushell

Posts with mentions or reviews of nushell. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-05-06.
  • Brush (Bo(u)rn(e) RUsty SHell) a POSIX and Bash-Compatible Shell in Rust
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 May 2025
    Since everyone is sharing shells written in Rust, I've become quite fond of Nushell: https://www.nushell.sh/

    I'd love to see more shell exploring things beyond POSIX. Text based stdin/stdout will always have its place, but having ways to express, serialize, and pass along data in more structured ways is quite nice.

  • Advanced Shell Scripting with Bash (2006) [pdf]
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2025
    I'm an incredibly happy user of nushell, which brings all the best features of bash and all the best features of more well designed scripting languages in one awesome package that also comes with editor (LSP) support and excellent documentation

    https://www.nushell.sh/

    (The intro page may be a bit misleading. You can freely mix-and-match existing, unstructured as well as nushell-built-in structured commands in the pipeline, as long as you convert to/from string streams - its not mandatory to use the structured built-ins. For example if an existing cli tool has json output, you can use `tool | from json` to turn it into structured data. There are also commands like `detect columns` that parses classic column output, and so on - the tools to mix-and-match structured and unstructured data are convenient and expressive)

  • Ask HN: What's the Best Open Source Tool You've Discovered Recently?
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Apr 2025
    Best thing I've found recently is nushell[0], paired with jc [1] it's pretty much the best shell I've ever used.

    [0] https://www.nushell.sh/

  • Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Mar 2025
    REPL-ify your command line then? There's nothing that says you have to be stuck on bash for your command line needs. https://www.nushell.sh/
  • Dear (Rust) Devs: Article Request
    4 projects | dev.to | 1 Mar 2025
    Nearly all my developer tools are open-source projects written in Rust (Nushell, Helix, WezTerm, and more).
  • Xonsh – A Python-Powered Shell
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Feb 2025
  • Linux as co-operative Windows process
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Feb 2025
    Have you tried nushell (https://www.nushell.sh/)? It embeds GNU coreutils written in Rust, so it feels like Linux even on a Windows machine.
  • Easy development environments with Nix and Nix flakes!
    9 projects | dev.to | 15 Jan 2025
  • Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2025
    > Another example is jq. I use it occasionally, and ChatGPT handles the syntax pretty well. For me, learning it properly just isn’t worth the time or effort.

    This resonates with me, I was in exactly the same position when I needed to do something with `kubectl` JSON output - just ask ChatGPT because I couldn't be bothered to learn the unintuitive syntax.

    Interestingly I _can_ blame the tool, because I started using Nushell[1] which has built-in JSON manipulation that provides a MUCH simpler syntax, and I have learnt this properly because it was that easy.

    1: https://www.nushell.sh/

  • I'm Publishing Matanuska BASIC's ADRs
    6 projects | dev.to | 13 Dec 2024
    But these fantasy consoles are aimed largely at the classic BASIC use case of writing simple games. My interest, meanwhile, is in replacing my shell. I want a BASIC that can be a useful, productive stand-in for bash. In this sense, I'm actually more influenced by new-school shells like nushell, elvish and PowerShell.

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 2025-05-20.
  • Why your terminal is boring and what to use instead
    7 projects | dev.to | 20 May 2025
  • Building Debian packages from source in bootstrapped Debian
    3 projects | dev.to | 17 Apr 2025
    Terminal emulator Alacritty, for instance. The version in the Debian Stable repo is dated— Alacritty of this version uses a .yml config file, but newer versions have switched to .toml.
  • Exploring Rust: A Rubyist's Perspective
    4 projects | dev.to | 28 Feb 2025
    Rust is one of the most appreciated programming languages, as highlighted in the GitHub Octoverse Survey. It offers memory safety, high performance, and strong tooling, making it a solid choice for both small utilities and large-scale applications. Many of the tools I use daily, like Alacritty and 1Password, benefit from Rust's speed and reliability.
  • Switching from tmux to Zellij
    3 projects | dev.to | 28 Feb 2025
    That's it! Happy CLI mastery with Zellij, Oh My zsh and Alacritty!
  • Release Notes for Ghostty 1.1.0
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2025
    I don't want to learn tmux to handle a feature that my OS already handles. If alacritty supported tabs (and was slightly less hostile, e.g. [0]) I'd be happy with it

    [0] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3129

  • From iTerm To WezTerm
    9 projects | dev.to | 9 Jan 2025
    I also tried Alacritty, but it is very basic and lacks the features I need. Recently, I tested Ghostty, which has gained huge attention – it has nice defaults, but its RAM usage is concerning (around 250MB per empty tab). Currently, it also lacks buffer search, which makes the terminal useless for me.
  • 3 years old PR to Alacritty for Support for graphics remains open
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2025
  • Ghostty 1.0
    36 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2024
    That's a great approach.

    Not sure on the current state of Alacritty, but a few years back the suggested solution for users interested in battery performance was to switch a different terminal emulator: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3473#issuecomm...

  • Preview images, videos, fonts, PDFs ... in Vifm.
    7 projects | dev.to | 20 Nov 2024
    The terminal I am currently using is st but I have also tested this "Vifm" enhancement in kitty and alacritty.
  • Faking the tmux experience on Windows using AutoHotkey
    1 project | dev.to | 20 Sep 2024
    I chose Alacritty for this. Why? Because it's written in Rust. Is there any other reason? It also has a pretty simple and has an easy to understand settings page and uses TOML. It also has built in support for vi motions. All wins. It's pretty easy to install as well, just follow the link above. I went with the portable version. Just make sure you note where it is going to look for the configuration files.

What are some alternatives?

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

fish-shell - The user-friendly command line shell.

Rio - A hardware-accelerated GPU terminal emulator focusing to run in desktops and browsers.

elvish - Powerful scripting language & versatile interactive shell

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

PowerShell - PowerShell for every system!

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

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InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
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SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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Did you know that Rust is
the 5th most popular programming language
based on number of references?