Modding Alacritty

Linux-Setup
Modding Alacritty

If something in my surroundings looks too good I can't stop thinking how to make it look better. Maybe its ADHD but that's thrown around too much these days its hard to tell who's just making things up. But anyways. I looked into modding my alacritty terminal just out of curiosity. I have been using it as it was out of the box for a while. But I felt bored and thought modding it would be a good pass time.

Here's what I learnt.

  • Config location

Alacritty configs are placed at one of the following locations ( organized by order in which alacritty searches for them )

- $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.toml
- $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.toml
- $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml
- $HOME/.alacritty.toml
- /etc/alacritty/alacritty.toml

I had none so I had to create one. Turns out installing alacritty does not auto create a config file.

  • Theme Configuration

    • Method 1: Paste your theme-config in a config file at one of the above specified locations.

    • Method 2: Installing AUR theme package.

      • Install alacritty-theme-git from the aur with yay -S alacritty-theme-git.
      • Add path to your preferred theme to the config section general.yaml
       ``` yaml 
   [general]
   import = ["/usr/share/alacritty/themes/your_theme.toml"]

  • Font configuration

    • My font looks a bit like its Monospace. fc-match says its Free Sans. But alacritty’s configuration page says its monospace regular so I guess thats what it is. I like how my font is but it doesn’t hurt to know how to change it if I ever want to.

    • Modifying the following settings should do that job.

    [font]
size = 12.0

[font.bold]
family = "monospace"
style = "Bold"

[font.bold_italic]
family = "monospace"
style = "Bold Italic"

[font.italic]
family = "monospace"
style = "Italic"

[font.normal]
family = "monospace"
style = "Regular"

  • You can find what fonts you have on your system by runnig:

    $ fc-list : family style

Extras

  • I like how my terminal looks and always want to maintain that when I ssh into some remote server. I did not know how to make that so. But now I do. Here's how;

    infocmp > alacritty.terminfo  # export Alacritty's Terminfo 
scp alacritty.terminfo user@remote-host:~/  # or any other method to copy to the remote host

    So in the above bash code, Infocmp is a command to get info about your terminal. That data is redirected the to the file alacritty.terminfo with the redirection operator >. scp is then used to copy that file to the server.

    infocmp | ssh "$user@$host" 'tic -x /dev/stdin'

Closing

  • Well, after all that I only changed my default theme to Linux.toml. This post will keep getting more mod sections as I add more settings to my config. Meanwhile, you can visit alacritty’s config page via the second link provided among the links below.

Refs and Sources