Starting Neovim in a Separate Alacritty Window

I have been using Alacritty + Tmux as my default terminal for 2 years now and am very happy with it.

Vim is one of my go to editors. I use Neovim, a Vim fork with additional features. For any development activities I find it inconvenient to use Vim inside terminal as I will be using the terminal for various other things as well. I prefer a GUI. For Neovim there are a lot of GUIs available as mentioned in their wiki page. I have used VimR, Oni, gnvim and neovide. Among them I chose VimR as I find it very stable. However, none of these GUIs were as fast as Neovim running inside terminals like Alacritty.

Recently I came to know that, any number of Alacritty instances can be started using the alacritty commad. It has an option to start Alacritty with a different configuration. Also, we can pass a command the will be executed on startup. It even has a way to set a custom title in title bar. On looking at these options I got an idea of starting Neovim in a separate Alacritty window similar to a Neovim GUI.

> alacritty -h
alacritty 0.5.0 (a6681e3)
Christian Duerr <contact@christianduerr.com>
Joe Wilm <joe@jwilm.com>
GPU-accelerated terminal emulator

USAGE:
    alacritty [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
...

OPTIONS:
...
    -e, --command <command>...                       Command and args to execute (must be last argument)
        --config-file <config-file>
            Specify alternative configuration file [default: $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml]
    -t, --title <title>                              Defines the window title [default: Alacritty]
        --working-directory <working-directory>      Start the shell in the specified working directory

I started of with creating a new Alacritty configuration because my default configuration makes Alacritty enter a tmux session on startup. Also, I wanted to keep my Alacritty Terminal configuration and Alacritty Neovim configuration separate.

Then I was able to launch Neovim like this:

> alacritty --config-file ~/.config/alacritty/anvim.yml --title nvim --working-directory ~/ -e $SHELL -lc "nvim"

Nice. But this has few issues:

• The process we started will be in the foreground and occupies a terminal/tmux pane
• It might write some output to stdout which would be noisy
• On closing the terminal/tmux pane our alacritty process will be killed
• It opens Neovim with user’s home directory as working directory. Opening a project directory or $PWD would be helpful

So, how do we solve these? I wrote a shell function called anvim. It starts the alacritty process in the background and will ignore any hungup signal. So it won't be killed even if we close the terminal/tmux pane. It is also capable of opening $PWD or a given directory or file.

• First argument is the file or directory to open. If not given, it opens home directory
• is used to ignore hangup signal from terminal
• Trailing & pushes the process to background
• >/dev/null redirects stdout to null

As you can see in the screenshot, I did anvim . within ~/dotfiles directory and it is opened in Neovim inside a new Alacritty window. The title is also set appropriately in the Alacritty window.

Alacritty Neovim configuration I use and the anvim function is available in my dotfiles repo as well:

• anvim.yml
• anvim function

Note: This is not a full-fledged Neovim GUI. All it does is separates the Neovim editor from the main Alacritty instance like how a Neovim GUI but without compromising performance benefits provided by Alacritty.

Originally published at https://arunvelsriram.dev.