ALACRITTY(1)

✨ ALACRITTY(1) — General Commands Manual 💖

🌸 NAME

Alacritty — a fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator 🦋

💅 SYNOPSIS

okay so Alacritty is a modern terminal emulator that comes with sensible defaults but is also super customizable 🎀 it doesn't reinvent every feature from scratch. instead it plays nice with other apps, and that's how it gets a flexible feature set with high performance ✨ iconic behavior, honestly 👑

🎀 FLAGS

• -h, --help — prints help info 🫶
• --hold — stays open after the child process exits 🦋
• --daemon — does not spawn an initial window 🌙
• --print-events — prints all events to STDOUT 👀
• -q — lowers verbosity, and the lowest level is -qq 🧊
• --ref-test — generates ref test 🧪
• -v — raises verbosity, and the max level is -vvv 📢
• -V, --version — prints version info 🏷️

⭐ OPTIONS

• --class <GENERAL> | <GENERAL>,<INSTANCE> — sets the window class hint on Linux 🐧

ngl this one's a little bit tricky but it's fine, bestie. if you only pass the general class, the instance gets set to the same value too. on Wayland the general class sets the app_id, and the instance class gets ignored 🙈

Default: Alacritty,Alacritty 💜

• -e, --command <COMMAND>... — the command and args you want to run (it has to be the last argument!) 🏃‍♀️
• --config-file <CONFIG_FILE> — points to an alternative config file 📁

Alacritty won't make the config file for you, which is lowkey a vibe check 💀 but it does look for one in these spots on UNIX systems:

1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.toml
2. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.toml
3. $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml
4. $HOME/.alacritty.toml
5. /etc/alacritty/alacritty.toml

On Windows, it checks here:

1. %APPDATA%\alacritty\alacritty.toml

• --embed <PARENT> — embeds Alacritty inside an X11 window ID (decimal, or hexadecimal with a 0x prefix) 🪟
• -o, --option <OPTION>... — overrides config file options 💅

Example: alacritty -o 'cursor.style="Beam"' ✨

• --socket <SOCKET> — path for IPC socket creation 🔌
• -T, --title <TITLE> — defines the window title 🌈

Default: Alacritty 💖

• --working-directory <WORKING_DIRECTORY> — starts the shell in the directory you pick 📂

🧚 SUBCOMMANDS

• msg — sends IPC socket messages (see alacritty-msg(1)) 💌
• migrate — migrates the config file 🚚
  • -c, --config-file <CONFIG_FILE> — path to the config file 📁
  • -d, --dry-run — only outputs TOML config to STDOUT 🧾
  • -i, --skip-imports — doesn't recurse over imports 🙅‍♀️
  • --skip-renames — doesn't move renamed fields to their new spot 🫠
  • -s, --silent — doesn't output anything to STDOUT 🤫
  • -h, --help — prints help info 🫶

🦋 SEE ALSO

alacritty-msg(1), alacritty(5), alacritty-bindings(5), alacritty-escapes(7) 📚

🐞 BUGS

found a bug?? 😭 please report it at https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues 🫶

👑 MAINTAINERS

• Christian Duerr <contact@christianduerr.com> 💜
• Kirill Chibisov <contact@kchibisov.com> 🌸

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bestie, that's the whole tea ☕️ this page is from alacritty 2026-04-13 🍓 manpage ALACRITTY(1), signing off with a 💅 and a 🧚‍♀️ see u in the terminal, babe 🌈