Introduction to Alacritty: A Lightweight Terminal Emulator

Alacritty, known for its speed and efficiency, stands out as a lightweight and GPU-accelerated terminal emulator. Striking a balance between simplicity and performance, Alacritty has become a popular choice among users seeking a fast and responsive terminal experience.

Navigating the Transition: From alacritty.yml to alacritty.toml

As Alacritty evolves, so does its configuration. If you don't know before version 0.13.0 (78fa4d6f) alacritty.yml was used as its configuration file. The shift from using alacritty.yml to alacritty.toml brings about a need for users to adapt their customization strategies. In this article, we explore a practical workaround to ensure a seamless transition, specifically addressing the challenge presented by tools like alacritty-themes that were originally tailored for the YAML configuration.

The alacritty-themes was an excellent npm package which as its name suggests was used for theming alacritty. these features made it good at what it was made for

• Live preview of the themes
• 200+ Themes to choose from
• Apply any theme with just one command at the terminal
• Option to create your alacritty.yml config file
• Simple, Easy and intuitive User experience

npm i -g alacritty-themes

npx alacritty-themes

paru -S alacritty-themes

alacritty-themes

alacritty-themes Dracula

But this tool was made for alacritty.yml files and seeing the last commit on it which was 7 months ago as of writing this post, it seems like it will be a while before they fix this problem.

So for this, I found a temporary workaround not as great as the tool.

First, let's move all your alacritty.yml to alacritty.toml for this you'll need to learn toml file format and re-write your entire configuration from yaml to toml, good let's start from the basics. hehe just kidding just run this command

alacritty migrate

Now your alacritty.yml has been converted to alacritty.toml.

Now let's collect some themes we'll use this official alacritty repo of themes collection all are in toml format.

alacritty / alacritty-theme

Collection of Alacritty color schemes

Alacritty Theme

Collection of colorschemes for easy configuration of the Alacritty terminal emulator.

Installation

Imports

Clone the repository, or download the theme of your choice:

# We use Alacritty's default Linux config directory as our storage location here.
mkdir -p ~/.config/alacritty/themes
git clone https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty-theme ~/.config/alacritty/themes

Add an import to your alacritty.toml (Replace {theme} with your desired colorscheme):

import = [
    "~/.config/alacritty/themes/themes/{theme}.toml"
]

Manual

To manually include a colorscheme in an existing alacritty.toml, you just need to copy the entire content of the theme into the root level of your configuration file.

Color Schemes

NAME	COLORS
afterglow source
alabaster source
alabaster_dark source
alacritty_0_12 source
argonaut source
ashes_dark source
ashes_light source
atom_one_light source
aura source
ayu_dark source
ayu_light source
baitong source
base16_default_dark source
blood_moon source
bluish
breeze source
campbell source
carbonfox source
catppuccin_frappe source
catppuccin_latte source
catppuccin_macchiato source
catppuccin_mocha source
challenger_deep source
chicago95
citylights source
Cobalt2

…

View on GitHub

Clone this repo where your alacritty.yml file is for it was at ~/.config/alacritty/ so I cloned it there
Use these commands

# We use Alacritty's default Linux config directory as our storage location here.
mkdir -p ~/.config/alacritty/themes
git clone https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty-theme ~/.config/alacritty/themes

Now go to your .bashrc or .zshrc or whatever your configuration file is for your shell environment and create a alias add this line

alias themes="ls ~/.config/alacritty/themes/themes | fzf | xargs -I {} ln -sf ~/.config/alacritty/themes/themes/{} ~/.config/alacritt
y/current_theme.toml && echo "@@@" >> ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml && sed -i '/@@@/d' ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml"

To understand what this command is doing let's break it into 4 parts

1. ls ~/.config/alacritty/themes/themes This part is just listing the theme files that we git cloned.

2. The above command's output is piped into fuzzy finder fzf. You can find the installation instructions at

   junegunn / fzf

   🌸 A command-line fuzzy finder

   ^{Special thanks to:}
   
   

   

   Warp is a modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in so you and your team can build great software, faster.

   ^{Visit warp.dev to learn more.}

   
   

   ---

   

   fzf is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.

   

   It's an interactive filter program for any kind of list; files, command history, processes, hostnames, bookmarks, git commits, etc. It implements a "fuzzy" matching algorithm, so you can quickly type in patterns with omitted characters and still get the results you want.

   Highlights

   • 📦 Portable — Distributed as a single binary for easy installation
   • ⚡ Blazingly fast — Highly optimized code instantly processes millions of items
   • 🛠️ Extremely versatile — Fully customizable via an event-action binding mechanism
   • 🔋 Batteries included — Includes integration with bash, zsh, fish, Vim, and Neovim

   Sponsors ❤️

   I would like to thank all the sponsors of this project who make it possible for me to continue to improve fzf.

   If…

   
   

   View on GitHub

   
   

3. Now the output of fuzzy finder is piped into xargs -I {} ln -sf ~/.config/alacritty/themes/themes/{} ~/.config/alacritt

y/current_theme.toml This is creating a symbolic link at ~/.config/alacritty/current_theme.toml for the theme file that you selected in fuzzy finder like if you selected gruvbox.toml in fzf it'll create a symbolic link for ~/.config/alacritty/themes/themes/gruvbox.toml to here ~/.config/alacritty/current_theme.toml.

4. The last part is this echo "@@@" >> ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml && sed -i '/@@@/d' ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml this is just appending a @@@ string at the end of the alacritty.toml file and removing it I'll tell you the reason for this later.

okay now you just need to add this line to your alacritty.toml file

import = [
    "~/.config/alacritty/current_theme.toml"
]

Remove any color scheme in your toml file because if there is already manual color scheme the import of the theme file will not work. All should work now just enter your alias command > choose the theme > press enter and that's it.

Now to explain the reason for the 4 part is that remember we created a symbolic link at ~/.config/alacritty/current_theme.toml for the theme file we'll select and have added an entry of importing it in alacritty but as you'll run the complete command you will not see any color scheme change that is because you have changed the content of current_theme.toml (more specifically it's redirection location) not the content of alacritty.toml and alacritty only refreshes if it detects any changes in it's configuration file the complete command (the 4th part) cause some change in file by adding @@@ and removing it next so the color scheme refreshes.