Alacritty vs Cmder

Alacritty is a free, cross-platform terminal emulator for Linux, macOS, Windows, and BSD. It uses OpenGL and is designed for high performance and extensive configuration, for people who spend substantial time in a terminal. Vi mode supports viewport and scrollback navigation, text selection, and copying with keyboard bindings; users can also search forward or backward through scrollback. Configurable regex hints can recognize visible text or links and pass them to an external application or trigger a built-in action. One instance can run multiple terminal windows, including through the alacritty msg create-window command. Alacritty is designed to integrate with other applications rather than recreate their functions, and URL-opening applications can be configured. Settings use a TOML file that the software does not create automatically. The project describes Alacritty as beta, with missing features and bugs still to address. It has no tabs, split panes, or graphical configuration editor, and requires OpenGL ES 2.0. Windows use requires ConPTY support on Windows 10 version 1809 or higher.

Cmder is a free, portable console emulator package for Windows. It uses ConEmu with Clink enhancements, a Monokai color scheme, and a custom prompt layout. Tabs can run cmd.exe, PowerShell, Bash, and Mintty shells. The package supports split panes, a scripting API, and SSH. Settings, aliases, and history can travel with Cmder on a USB stick or in the cloud. The Full edition includes Git for Windows and its Unix commands in PATH; Mini excludes vendored Git binaries. Aliases are configured with the alias command and stored in config/aliases, while executable files placed in bin are added to PATH. Registering with /REGISTER ALL adds a “Cmder Here” option to File Explorer. The documentation describes starting the vendored SSH agent with start-ssh-agent. Mini is a roughly 7.8MB download; Full is about 100MB or 52MB as a 7z archive. The project is licensed under MIT.