To be fair, I thought the dev’s response was adequate here. Just posting on the issue section that the “colors are wrong” while comparing with uxrvt, without any explanation or self-investigation as to why this could be a problem, has ample potential to be regarded as rude to the devs (I’m using this another terminal app and have better colors, why aren’t you fixing this?)

And please note that Mac OS is NOTORIOUS for having bad/buggy/outdated support for OpenGL (which alacritty extensively uses), and this is a legitimate frustration that many developers in the low-level graphics domain have. It’s already really maddening for the devs, the contributors shouldn’t nag too much about it (I understand people outside the domain might genuinely not know this - but it’s always good to read some of the previous Github issues before filing your own, to learn the general “vive” among the core contributors)

> To be fair, I thought the dev’s response was adequate here

No it wasn't. It was bad.

Granted, the original bug report could have been a bit clearer, but the reporter was more than happy to help out and promptly responded to the questions and even some checking of the RGB of the colour in question, and then offered to open up a new related issue. But the dev in this case took the worse interpretation of the reporter's intent and claimed they were rude, or disrespectful or whatever, and took their report as an attack on their choice of default palette. I can imagine that the reporter was surprised and puzzled to be called "entitled" here.

And from the dev's followup explanation it just feels like their default is that everyone is entitled so they react accordingly. That response sure came out of left field, and I think the dev is lacking a little self awareness. Taking a defensive stance from the beginning is just bound to cause unnecessary drama.

> Aparently the defaults are poor. The default green is 0xb9ca4a which is actually yellow. I think it would be a good idea to copy the default colors from urxvt.

Sounds a little bit entitled to me..

Opinionated, maybe. Entitled?? That's way out of line.

IDK, the screenshot posted makes what is supposed to be pretty primary (OK secondary) color green look like yellow. Color in terminals is pretty important; if I configured something to use ANSI green and it came out like Alacritty rendered it, I'd think something was off. Why is the default theme not standard?

And FWIW, that website they're all referencing absolutely will not say a color contains mostly "yellow" (it reports the highest RGB value), no matter what you do [1].

[1]: https://www.color-hex.com/color/feff00

>To be fair, I thought the dev’s response was adequate here. Just posting on the issue section that the “colors are wrong” while comparing with uxrvt

I went and looked at the issue, and the title is not "colors are wrong" but it is "Colors don't look as they should". Interesting how everyone comes away with what they this was said. Says a lot about the dev who responded, really.

Wow, that's very insightful, and explains the dev's response. He genuinely thought he was being insulted.

This says a lot about me, but I empathize with that. That the reason I strive to be perfect in everything is that I feel like I'm under attack. Illogically, because I was, as a child, continually insulted.

It's a shitty way of living, trust me. But I get it.

If MacOS support is terrible, then they could either not advertise it[1] or disclaim it results in poor UX.

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty#installation

Labeling a piece of software as "cross platform" without testing on all platforms comes across as dishonest.

Yes, it can be frustrating when your users don't know as much about your product as you do and ask for help in a vague way. It's unintuitive that a color named green would correspond to the color on the left that I don't think most people would think to check.

It's totally fine to have a policy of not supporting OSX, as long as you communicate it with professionalism or at least civility.

Adequate, meaning good enough, but with room for improvement?

Yeah, obviously not “perfect”, but totally understandable if the dev’s stressed out a bit.

Yeah, this was my take away as well. Also, iirc their claims of Alacritty being the "fastest" are dubious at best.

I used Kitty for a while instead, which is very similar. More recently I've been trying out Foot: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

Dubious indeed. I gave Alacritty a really good shot, as I was super excited to have a faster terminal. But my entire experience was plagued with slowdowns -- huge latencies, cat'ing huge files was very slow. I spent tons of time trying to tune things to make it good but it just never got there.

Basically every other "simple" terminal I've found behaves better -- xterm, urxvt, konsole, even iTerm2.

I have no idea how they can claim "fastest".

I did quite a bit of testing of alacritty, kitty, iTerm2, and default macos terminal. Kitty shown best results even using test that alacritty is using (tree /) vim is faster in kitty (by perception), both when ran without multiplexor and inside tmux session

alacritty is GPU accelerated terminal. It may not be faster depending on your setup. xterm is also one of the fastest software terminals out there.

Yeah but their slogan isn't "fastest terminal depending on your setup."

Yeah, their original benchmarks were, uh...

> Benchmarks so far have just involved running find /usr on my Linux system with Alacritty, st, and urxvt, and on macOS against Terminal.app and iTerm2.

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/289#issuecomme...

They decided to continue marketing it as the fastest terminal emulator anyway.

> > Correct accuracy of first sentence in README #798

> >

> > As documented in #289 it's not currently the fastest-- only a small number of terminals running a single task for initially benchmarked.

>

> nah

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/pull/798

I must say I am very impressed by Kitty's number of open and closed issues on Github. And it has so many features. The developer also seems like a nice guy and open to suggestions. I have used urxvt for a long time but wanted to try something more modern out, and set Kitty up today with a nice small config. I like it a lot so far.

> The developer also seems like a nice guy and open to suggestions.

To be clear, we’re talking about Kovid here, right?

Yes.

Thanks for calling this out. This is not something I would have thought to check myself. It's unfortunate the most common use of the word toxic is in a very abstract sense, but the behavior you identify is just plain unnecessary rudeness and a much more suitable use of the word.

Can we assume people are acting in good faith until we have reason to think otherwise? As highlighted by the green-is-yellow issue, it is OK to simply say, "Understood. The color scheme has been previously discussed, is popular and isn't currently considered for change. But you can configure it yourself by <link-to-documentation>..." The accusation of an entitled attitude appears a bit of a leap to me too. To be fair, while a tad rude in tone, the dev's second post is an improvement.

Or perhaps, "We don't have a lot of resources for this level of detail. Sorry." (Open-source honesty?) Or even, "If you wrote a patch taking the values from rxvt it would be considered but possibly rejected after discussing policy with lead devs."

> But you can configure it yourself by <link-to-documentation>...

The two first comments of the maintainer in the thread mentioned the configurability of alacritty, giving soft hints that maybe the user should just set it privately to comfort their private taste. I feel that discussions about taste choices can sometimes be the most tiring ones, because often people have different tastes and you can't give rational arguments why you like one taste more. That's why there is configurability in the first place, maintainers recognizing that people have a diversity of personal tastes. You can't ever do it right by everyone. Maybe the maintainer should have communicated that better more early on, but they did communicate something along those lines later on. They were still around to explain themselves.

In this case, it’s not even taste preference but color perception, which is even harder to objectify.

TBH, I detect grumpiness from his initial comment. He might not be a bad person, but if it's in an office, I'd probably apologize first if it was me who said that.

The thing that got me annoyed was the bold claim that it‘s the fastest terminal emulator even though many people reported that other terminal emulators were faster. For instance, urxvt was 3 to 5 times faster last time I checked (in addition to also being rock solid).

> Strike 2/2 was multiple devs responding to OSX issues with "switch operating systems"

What are the devs supposed to do? Debug the proprietary driver? They might not even own a Mac device because they give the software away for free and don't want to spend thousands on their spare time hobby. OpenGL drivers, regardless of manufactuer btw, have massive issues with bugs. They were so serious in fact, that the original glium maintainer gave up maintaining it. Having taken over emergency maintainership of glium, the way I deal with such issues now is to close them with a response that PRs are welcome (unless my specific config can reproduce them).

Also, extremely often you see open source as well as proprietary software on hn that's mac only. Isn't that, too, maintainers saying "switch operating systems"?

> What are the devs supposed to do? Debug the proprietary driver?

As you said, "The maintainers don't own macs; PR's welcome. You might also file an issue with Apple." would be a perfectly reasonable response.

Why do people insist on supporting the closed source horror show of os x aid beyond me.

Apple docs are some of the worst on the planet. It's like they intend on making the barrier to entry high so once you are in the club you somehow have prestige.

No, you have Stockholm syndrome.

Oof, that interaction was uncomfortable. Definitely a very bad look for that dev.

The other dev chiming in at the end with "I've heard only good things about Alacritty's default colorscheme so far" was also frustrating. Saying "well nobody else complained" is an awful reason to dismiss an issue.

Considering this is their reaction to someone pointing out that their green is actually yellow, I'm not surprised that they are in an echo chamber.

Echo chamber is one term, another would be tribe.

An insecure group member feels threatened by an outsider and lashes out. Another group member sees an outsider triggering a group member and he immediately jumps into help. Together, they attack the outsider and drive him off.

I think if the maintainer was less insecure and more able to take critique, the exchange wouldn't have aroused the "fight or flight" instincts of the group.

An open source project with a closed source mentality.

Re: macOS, I don't think the people currently maintaining Alacritty have the ability or the inclination to fix those issues, some of which have been widely reported. Users keep opening duplicate issues without realizing it. I was guilty of this myself; I'm one of many people to notice problems with font fallback on macOS. While I thought the dev who responded to me could have been a bit nicer, it's probably frustrating for them to go through the same routine over and over. I also didn't really understand, at first, what was causing the problem that I was seeing. So I was not only bothering them, but my sense is that I came off as an idiot. (After poking around a bit, I found that the problem is in Alacritty's crossfont library. I forked it, added a temporary fix, and built my own version of the app from source. It was a happy ending to a not-entirely-pleasant experience.)

I was experimenting with it this week as well, and that exact issue was what had me uninstall it. I guess this post doesn't add much value, but I thought the (synchronicity?) Of our experiences was interesting.

It's a curious hill to die on, so to speak.

I imagine they would probably say the same thing to you.

You're really not willing to use an excellent piece of software because one time you saw a dev dismiss someone who didn't like the default color scheme? How is that not even more petty?

Hey, vote with your wallet. A lot of people here on HN go out of their way to avoid products from companies that they view as poisonous, this is no different really.

You mean products with closed source, made by people who cannot be trusted? Yes, I think it's different. How many people here refuse to run Linux because they don't like the way Linus talks on the mailing lists?

poisonous, toxic, abuse....

You sure aren't running out of creative synonyms to make drama over a pretty insignificant incident.

I also read some of their interactions with people having issues on Gnome Wayland. I recently switched to Tilix. I realized multiplexing makes me a lot faster than gpu powered terminal. and if I'm supposed to use tmux, then alacritty is a lot slower with tmux and loses it's "speed" (it's another issue on their page that I had fun reading all the way through)

From that github discussion:

> "The default green is 0xb9ca4a [which is actually yellow](https://www.color-hex.com/color/b9ca4a)."

While I agree that 0xb9ca4a is not a good choice for a default green, I disagree with the claim that it's yellow. In fact, the website that user cited for their "which is actually yellow" claim doesn't say what that user claims. That website says:

> Color #b9ca4a contains mainly GREEN color.

To my eyes, it's puke green. And the shades and tints of this color shown on that page make it clear that this is green.

That was my conclusion as well after my limited interactions with them. I no longer use it.

Wow, that's an ugly dev response.

A quick look found you a 3 year old closed issue?

It's equally "toxic" imo to torpedo a project, and all the efforts because of some bad communication.

Sure, the dev did fly off the handle initially but if you read the whole tread, he comes around, and actually keeps responding - in other words he cares.

We already seldomnly argue the point anymore. Now it seems we don't even evaluate software at core value anymore, rather we must know the personality of its creators.

Yes. I opened alacritty for the first time, wondered why my greens were showing up as yellow and googled it. This was the first result.

I doubt my comment is going to torpedo anything. But I didn't put down alacritty for "personality" reasons. There are a lot of excellent terminal emulators out there. This github issue wasn't an isolated incident, and if the devs are regularly this hostile there's bound to be lots of issues like this that won't be fixed. Especially since my OS is only nominally supported.

Another example of the bad attitude of the core devs (there are many, just look through some of the closed issues): https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/5029

I wish Kitty had more hype going for it, it deserves it more IMO.

2-3 years ago someone had a bad day so don’t use the project… I guess this is the today’s mentality. It is no longer enough that the software is good if they don’t publicly lynch every wrong thinker or mistake-maker who passes by they are guilty by association

Can it be that there is background between these people that we don’t know and it is not reflective of the general attitude? I am not justifying rudeness, but I understand the human relations, online or offline can be complex. Also if alacrity is really technically good do we tolerate bad behavior by its developers? A bit like House wanted to be the best partially because he did not want to care too much about his behavior.

clever. review project issues before investing time in using project.

The issue says the color choice was poor, effectively critiquing the ability of the person who chose that color.

I'd be insulted too. Wording choices matter.

Boohoo. Maybe call the git police?

Yeah, I side with the devs on that one.

Frankly, that is a total misrepresentation to call that verbal abuse. What it is, is frustrated devs dealing with a rudely worded and pointless issue.

That issue is literally just trying to start a bikeshed about a color in a standard color scheme they chose as the default. It could not be more useless. On top of that, they try to start that bikeshed by simply saying "the colors are wrong" and pointing to a terrible screenshot.

Open source devs have to deal with a ton of unproductive garbage issues that they are not paid to deal with which risks engendering total burnout. It is way too much to ask them to treat every single person with kid gloves especially when they are opening issues from a place of disrespect.