Alacritty vs xterm

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.

xterm is a free terminal emulator for the X Window System, available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It emulates DEC VT102 and VT220 terminals, selected features from VT320, VT420, and VT520, and Tektronix 4014 graphics. Separate xterm windows can run on remote machines and display locally over the X protocol; SSH support is also listed. The current version implements ISO/ANSI colors using background color erase. If the operating system supports terminal resizing, xterm can notify programs running in its window when its size changes. It works with different flavors of the Athena widgets and includes scripting support. The official page links to source and archive downloads, while the FAQ points to a manual page covering command-line options, X resources, and other configuration settings. Related components add support for encodings beyond ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8, X resource support, and TrueType fonts. The FAQ documents known limitations, including color behavior that can revert to monochrome. The maintainer has worked on xterm since early 1996; its origins are described as a collective effort maintained by the X Consortium.