workflows VS alacritty

Hi HN,

I’m Aloke, one of the co-creators of commands.dev (https://www.commands.dev/) and an engineer at Warp (https://www.warp.dev/).

Commands.dev is a curated, open-source collection of popular terminal commands that lets you quickly search for hard-to-remember terminal commands by title, tag, and description. Each of these pages are also indexed by Google to provide a consistent, well-formatted alternative to the variety of sources these commands turn up now, like StackOverflow.

As an engineer who uses the terminal frequently, I often have trouble remembering the exact command I want to execute if it’s not easily searchable within my terminal. Some commands that I run infrequently don’t match up with the underlying task they perform, which makes it even harder to find. For example, to undo my last git commit, I have to search for “git reset”, which I never remember because I’m always thinking “undo”ing my last commit instead of “reset”ing.

We built commands.dev so that there would be a centralized place to quickly find and search commands based on their name, description, or category. If you are a Warp user, these commands are also integrated directly into Warp as a feature we call Workflows (https://docs.warp.dev/features/workflows) so that you can quickly search and execute them directly from the terminal.

These commands are open-source (https://github.com/warpdotdev/workflows) and we would love contributions to make commands.dev even more useful. So far, we’ve already had 85 commands created by 22 unique contributors.

I’m excited to hear what you think of commands.dev! Our team sincerely hopes this will become a go-to tool on the Internet to consult when developers need to remember a difficult command, either directly on the site or by discovering a commands.dev page when searching Google for help with a command.

If you’re interested, join Warp’s Discord (www.warp.dev/discord) and follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/warpdotdev).

It's a good question, one that we are discussing a bunch.

We are planning to first open-source our Rust UI framework, and then parts and potentially all of our client codebase. The server portion of Warp will remain closed-source for now.

You can see how we’re thinking about open source here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/discussions/400 TLDR;

As a side note, we are open sourcing our extension points as we go. The community has already been contributing new themes [https://github.com/warpdotdev/themes]. And we’ve just opened a repository for the community to contribute common useful commands. [https://github.com/warpdotdev/workflows]

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