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+title: Termite Has Been Deprecated
+date: May 08, 2021 22:23
+---
+<p>
+I have been using <a href='https://github.com/thestinger/termite'>termite</a> as
+my daily driver terminal emulator for over five years now. Turns out that its
+creator and maintainer just announced that he's stopping development and
+abandoning the project. The reason?
+<a href='https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty'>Alacritty</a>, another terminal
+emulator, by termite maintainer's own judgment, is basically strictly better.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My main reasons for using termite were its minimalistic design, keyboard-driven,
+vi-like selection mode, and easy configuration. Alacritty, turns out, does all
+of these, while also being faster and more secure.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Switching to alacritty</h3>
+<p>
+On first hearing this, I immediately installed alacritty, just to check out if
+it really is a viable option for me. Before the installation completed, my first
+instinct was that I would have probably needed about a week or so to tweak my
+config and get used to the interface. I was expecting some switching friction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Turns out there was zero friction.  After 5 minutes of test running, I'd set
+alacritty to be my default terminal. I'm writing this post from inside
+it, and I don't even notice the difference, other than a slightly darker default
+color scheme. The vi-like selection mode is still at the familiar
+<code>ctrl+shift+space</code> keybinding, and it seems like that was the biggest
+termite-specific feature I was used to.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If anything, I'm already seeing big improvements when compared to termite.
+Specifically, the vi mode in termite had slight annoying issues: jumping by word
+didn't always work exactly the way I expected it to, and when copying selected
+text, the cursor actually had to be <em>one</em> character right of the last
+character you wanted to copy. I'm not seeing these issues with alacritty's
+vi mode, and so far it feels even more intuitive than termite's.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Bonus tip: terminal vs. ssh</h3>
+<p>
+On the occasion of getting a new terminal, I'm reminded of a very useful
+<a href='https://www.yaroslavps.com/weblog/fix-broken-terminal-ssh/'>
+  blogpost by Yaroslav de la Peña Smirnov
+</a> thanks to which I solved a mild annoyance I've had with termite for years.
+Basically, when logging into an ssh session on various machines from termite, I
+would have weird problems in the shell, the remote machine apparently not
+understanding how to communicate properly with my terminal. This would make
+commands like <code>clear</code> or <code>tmux</code> not work, or even more
+annoyingly, cursor navigation and erasing characters with backspace were broken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Previously, I had fixed this by hacking environment variables, but you can solve
+it much more cleanly with the following:
+<pre>
+# on your local machine:
+infocmp $TERM &gt; $TERM.terminfo
+scp $TERM.terminfo &lt;remote machine&gt;:~/
+
+# on remote machine:
+tic -x $TERM.terminfo
+</pre>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had to repeat this little ritual with alacritty and the remote machines I
+frequent, and now everything is working smoothly!
+</p>