From XTerm to Alacritty

Mikael Ståldal

11 October 2026

I have written before how to support tabs and scrollback in XTerm with tmux.

Now it seems like Wayland is replacing X11 as the default window system in Linux desktops. And XTerm, as the name implies, only supports X11. So I wanted to replace XTerm with another terminal with native Wayland support.

After trying a few options, I decided to go with Alacritty. As a bonus, you also get clickable hyperlinks (OSC 8).

Here is how I configured it to work with tmux:

~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml:

[scrolling]
history = 0

[selection]
save_to_clipboard = true

[terminal]
osc52 = "Disabled"

[[keyboard.bindings]]
key = "Tab"
mods = "Control"
chars = "\u001b[27;5;9~"

[[keyboard.bindings]]
key = "Tab"
mods = "Control|Shift"
chars = "\u001b[27;6;9~"

~/.tmux.conf:

set -s extended-keys on
set -as terminal-features 'alacritty*:hyperlinks'

set -g status off
set -g set-titles on
set -g set-titles-string "#{W:#{window_index} #{window_name}  ,[#{window_index} #{window_name}]  }"
set -g mouse off

# Ctrl-Tab
# set -s user-keys[0] "\033[27;5;9~"
bind-key -T root C-Tab next-window

# Ctrl-Shift-Tab
# set -s user-keys[1] "\033[27;6;9~"
bind-key -T root C-BTab previous-window

# Shift-PageUp
set -s user-keys[2] "\033[5;2~"
bind-key -T root User2 copy-mode -eu
bind-key -T copy-mode User2 send-keys -X page-up

# Shift-PageDown
set -s user-keys[3] "\033[6;2~"
bind-key -T copy-mode User3 send-keys -X page-down

~/.local/share/applications/alacritty-with-tmux.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=alacritty -e tmux
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name=Alacritty with tmux
Icon=Alacritty