Alacritty vs Cool Retro Term
Alacritty
alacritty.orgCool Retro Term
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Alacritty | Cool Retro Term |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Terminal Emulators | 8.5 (#7) | 8.8 (#2) |
| Spec score · Terminal apps | 8.3 (#11) | 8.0 (#24) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | Alacritty is a modern, cross-platform OpenGL terminal emulator designed for high performance and extensive configuration. | Cool Retro Term is a terminal emulator designed to mimic the look and feel of old cathode tube screens. |
| Support | The project README points users to the `#alacritty` channel on Libera.Chat for questions or quick help. | The project wiki provides installation and Linux/macOS build instructions, theme guidance, and information about the terminal widget. |
| Supported platforms | Linux,macOS,Windows,BSD | linux,macos |
Plans
In their own words
Alacritty
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.
Cool Retro Term
Cool Retro Term is a free, open-source terminal emulator for Linux and macOS that imitates the appearance of cathode-ray tube screens. The project describes it as customizable and reasonably lightweight. A context menu exposes color, font, and visual-effect settings. Community profiles can add flicker, scanline rasterization, screen curvature, static noise, and burn-in effects, while the wiki invites users to share themes and provides JSON examples. Release notes list support for multiple tabs and windows, plus shortcuts for tab management. Cool Retro Term uses the QML port of qtermwidget, a terminal widget based on Konsole. Linux users can download an AppImage or find packages in repositories for distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. macOS users can download a DMG. Build information covers Qt6 requirements, Linux Qt5 dependencies, and qmake instructions. Installation, build, theme, and widget guidance appears in the project wiki.