Use xterm-256color With Alacritty For Better ls Output
In switching to alacritty, I noticed something off about my ls
output. Previously, when I was using st, ls would highlight different files in different colours. For example, image files would be bold and purple and other files like .deb.
or .zip
files would be bold and red. Here is an example:

As opposed to what I was encountering:

Which is what you get if you use a TERM
variable set to alacritty
in your alacritty.yml
while you have another TERM
variable set in .profile
. Since changing that variable in my alacritty.yml
file to xterm-256color
and removing it entirely from my .profile
, the highlights have returned.
It would seem that the terminfo for alacritty is not in the default installations for any of the systems I use (Debian and OpenBSD, at the moment) nor is it included in the .deb
package I grabbed from their GitHub releases page. Therefore, setting the TERM
variable to alacritty
in alacritty.yml
without having anything in .profile
actually results in an almost completely broken terminal experience where there are no colours by default and SSH sessions do not behave well unless I export TERM=xterm-256color
beforehand.
Also, Alacritty 0.5 is out which includes a new Vi mode!
This is my eighty-fifth post for the #100DaysToOffload challenge. You can learn more about this challenge over at https://100daystooffload.com.