Alacritty vs Hyper

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.

Hyper is a free terminal application for people working in a command-line interface. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with split panes, GPU acceleration, SSH support, and a scripting API. The project says speed and stability are priorities and uses xterm.js as its terminal engine. Users can configure the shell, environment variables, appearance, window size, scrollback, and other settings in .hyper.js, and change command bindings there as well. Themes and extensions provide additional ways to alter or intercept terminal behavior. Extensions are Node.js modules available on npm; the API lets plugins work with React components and Redux actions. Plugins can be reloaded with Command+R, and Hyper also loads them periodically or after plugin configuration changes. Downloads are listed for macOS, Windows, Debian, Fedora, and AppImage. The displayed latest version is v3.4.1.