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by foothall 1647 days ago
I don't know anything about Alacritty.

What is unhealthy about the project?

3 comments

I don't want to speak uncharitably of Alacritty, which was my daily driver for a couple years. It's FOSS, the developers don't owe me/us anything, etc. And I never contributed (though I tried once or twice and was summarily rejected).

It's better to focus on the positives of other projects. I will say, on a more specific note, that if you use macOS and have been frustrated with certain longstanding issues in Alacritty, you're in for a pleasant surprise with WezTerm.

I see. Poor MacOS support isn't indicative of an unhealthy project, but I can see why MacOS users might want to avoid such projects.
Support for macOS is not poor—though it could go that way eventually. It would be more accurate to say that Alacritty qua macOS software is now almost unmaintained. If you encounter a problem, don't hold your breath; deal with it in your own fork. (I did this for many months.)
The lead developer responding like this to bug reports is a good indicator.

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1561

I side with the lead developer. The "reporter" clearly don't use any nuances and think that his opinions are "aligned with the general public".
"Green should look like green and not yellow by default" is not an entitled opinion, and definitely shouldn't be met with the hostility it was.
The lead explains in more details

> The initial issue description basically said "the colors are wrong" with no description of what specifically is wrong, what you've tried (if anything), and a non-representative screenshot where your "expected" results are being skewed by the non-focused window dimming. You put the onus on us to engage and poke at your problem to find out what you actually want.

> The defaults don't match your urxvt installation, and because they don't match your previous terminal, you insist they are somehow wrong.

> "Aparently the defaults are poor" - attacking a decision based on your personal bias without consideration for why things are the way they are or that others may actually enjoy the defaults

> "I think it would be a good idea to copy the default colors from urxvt." - this is basically saying the same as above but with more emphasis on expecting the project to change for and accomodate you.

> "Should I open an issue to review the default colors?" - A harmless question by itself, but with context from previous comments, this is again expecting the project to change for you.

https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1561#issuecomm... describes why the maintainer thinks the opinion was entitled. I don't think your description is accurate.
You mean the original developer? When was he last involved? The problems I ran into, and saw other people experiencing, related to more recent maintainers. I'm not sure it's helpful to keep dredging up old issues like this.
There was a thread about this roughly two weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29349240

Thanks. The OP of the link relates to the high bar that Alacritty has for contributions.

I can understand this helps to keep Alacritty manageable. Leading projects sometimes involves saying no to features, as they do: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1309

That's just a tradeoff.