Replace alacritty terminal to foot

[uncomfyhalomacro]

Foot and alacritty share similar goals as they try to be a minimalistic terminal emulators only giving simpler features. But foot is very lightweight, both in dependencies and memory usage in comparison to alacritty. Both are great terminals and both are native on Wayland.

Reason for replacement was because of this PR https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/6255#issue-875946597

Not sure if you like it but I will gladly close this if you don't :)

[denisok]

interesting, thanks for the contribution :) I will give it a spin and see.

Lets wait maybe some ppl could vote here about it.

CC @agraul @m-rey @mcepl @taschenlampe

[mcepl]

Could anybody explain me why this in alacritty.yml:

# Font configuration (changes require restart)
font:
  # The size to use.
  size: 11.5
  # The normal (roman) font face to use.
  normal:
    family: Fira Code
    # Style can be specified to pick a specific face.
    style: Medium

  # The bold font face
  bold:
    family: Fira Code

  # The italic font face
  italic:
    family: Fira Code

and this in foot.ini:

font=Fira Code:style=Medium:size=11.5

gives me significantly larger fonts in foot? I have to go all the way to 9 for foot.ini to get something which looks more or less similar.

[uncomfyhalomacro]

@mcepl i actually have the same question as well. you might want to ask dnkl - the creator of foot. but if i have to guess, it might have to do with dpi scaling.. okay i will ask him myself

[uncomfyhalomacro]

According to dnkl

Foot does true DPI aware font scaling by default. I'm not aware of any other terminal that does this.

See the readme and the man pages for details.

I suspect that the font sizes will match if you set dpi-aware=no in foot.ini.

Reference issue: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/issues/1082

[uncomfyhalomacro]

with dpi-aware=no, font size of both terminals Alacritty(left) vs foot(right) are both 12.

[mcepl]

Shouldn’t we have dpi-aware=no in our configuration files so that users are not unpleasantly surprised?

[uncomfyhalomacro]

alright, will do.

[denisok]

btw, I am trying foot now on my openSUSEway TW, and I was wrong about 0.7 opacity, it is quite dark with default background that is default there. 0.5 works as a charm.

but I think that is more a question for personal taste. For most of the users they wouldn't have issue to configure it in ini file, for the rest there some conf utility needed to tweak those settings.

[mcepl]

Do we care that alacritty is in Rust and foot is plain C?

[uncomfyhalomacro]

Do we care that alacritty is in Rust and foot is plain C?

nope.

[mcepl]

OK, so the only unresolved problem for me is that I cannot make URLs clickable. Ah, I see, https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot#user-content-urls That’s pretty lame, and those letters are really hard to read.

[jubalh]

Short reminder: in case we switch we should update https://en.opensuse.org/Sway#fzf