It would be interesting to connect Pathfinder to Alacritty. They accelerate two different things: Pathfinder accelerates the glyph rasterization (converting the vector outlines to bitmaps), while Alacritty accelerates the glyph compositing (blitting the bitmaps onto the screen).

Would it change much? I imagine Alacritty doesn't rasterize the same glyphs over and over if they repeat and keeps some kind of Atlas, so using Pathfinder would just give a boost when creating that Atlas, which in the grand scheme of thing wouldn't change much?

Yeah, if you aren't (a) using CJK text or similar or (b) zooming your terminal I don't expect it to change a lot.

I'd expect the most visible improvements would be on screens full of CJK characters, based on what the original font-rs announcement's graphs showed.

"The simplicity goal means that it doesn't have many features like tabs or scroll back as in other terminals."

It's easy to be faster when you do less.

The end of your quote is:

> Instead, it is expected that users of Alacritty make use of a terminal multiplexer such as tmux.

Alacritty does one thing well. If you're using a terminal multiplexer or tiling window manager anyway, you're probably not using tabs; instead hoping there's a way to hide the 'tab bar' if only one is open. If you're using tmux, it has scrollback.

I've been using Alacritty without tmux or any other way of achieving scrollback, and I like it. The few times I've thought 'damn, I need to scroll back to that thing' it's because I should have done it differently anyway.