Install and Uninstall Alacritty Terminal Emulator on Ubuntu

The terminal emulator is one of the most controversial applications in Linux. There are many terminal emulators, but in this post, I will show you How to Install and Uninstall Alacritty Terminal - the fastest linux terminal emulator.

What is Alacritty?

Alacritty Terminal is a cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator works on macOS, Ubuntu, BSD, and Windows. It’s free and open-source software that strongly focus on simplicity and performance. And it features Vi mode, search, Vi search etc.

System Requirements

Option 1: Install Alacritty on Ubuntu using APT

Step 1: Open up your linux terminal emulator

Firstly, We need to open your terminal to run any command

Step 2: Add the PPA to your Linux

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:aslatter/ppa

The system will prompt you to press enter to continue

Step 3: Update the latest versions of the packages

sudo apt update

Step 4: Start installation with the latest version

Now you can start the installation with this command.

sudo apt install alacritty

Don’t forget to check if is installed correctly.

alacritty -V

Option 2: Install Alacritty from Source Code

Prerequisites

Step 1: Clone the source code

Before compiling Alacritty Terminal, you’ll have to first clone the source code by using these ubuntu commands:

git clone https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty.git
cd alacritty

Step 2: Install the Rust compiler with rustup

• Install rustup.rs
• To make sure you have the right Rust compiler installed, run these ubuntu commands:

rustup override set stable
rustup update stable

Step 3: Install Alacritty dependencies

These are the very minimal requirements for building; however, some installations may require extra dependencies.

If you’re using Wayland with an Nvidia GPU, you’ll probably want to install the EGL drivers as well (these are called libegl1-mesa-dev on Ubuntu).

sudo apt-get install cmake pkg-config libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libxkbcommon-dev python3

Building Alacritty Terminal

cargo build --release

If all goes well, this should place a binary at target/release/alacritty.

Create Desktop Entry

Many Linux and BSD distributions support desktop entries for adding applications to system menus. This will create a desktop shortcut for this powerful tool:

sudo cp target/release/alacritty /usr/local/bin # or anywhere else in $PATH
sudo cp extra/logo/alacritty-term.svg /usr/share/pixmaps/Alacritty.svg
sudo desktop-file-install extra/linux/Alacritty.desktop
sudo update-desktop-database

How to Uninstall Alacritty?

If you installed Alacritty using APT, you can uninstall by following these steps

sudo apt remove --auto-remove alacritty

When it is uninstalled, you should remove this PPA to make your Ubuntu clean.

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:aslatter/ppa

Conclusion

That’s what there is to it. You’ve completed the installation and setup of the Alacritty Terminal Emulator on Ubuntu.