A terminal application for configuring the Alacritty terminal emulator — safely, clearly, and beautifully.
🛡 Security — every release is GPG-signed and every commit is GitHub-Verified. Where We Stand covers our response to the 2026 AUR supply-chain attacks and how to check us yourself.
Alacritty is one of the fastest and most elegant terminals on Linux. But configuring it means opening a TOML file in a text editor, knowing exactly which settings and values are valid, and hoping you don't make a mistake that breaks your terminal.
There's no graphical settings window. There's no safety net.
alacrittyForge exists to change that. Configuring your terminal should be:
- Safe — a backup before every change, and a confirmation before every write
- Clear — settings explained in plain language and checked before they're saved
- Good-looking — a proper application, in the terminal it configures
- Approachable — keyboard-driven, fast, and usable if you just want your terminal to look right
Values are edited where they live. There's no separate form to fill in — you move to a setting in the table and change it in place.
-
🏠 Dashboard — your current setup at a glance: active theme, font, opacity, and how many backups you have
-
🔧 Config — one table of
Key | Value | Staged. Settings with a fixed set of valid options open a dropdown right at the cell, so typos are impossible. Long lists open a type-to-filter picker. Anything free-form opens a small editor. Colour values show a live ■ swatch. -
🎨 Themes — preview before you commit. Preview opens a window showing the palette, Activate stages your choice without writing anything, and only Apply writes the file — after a confirmation and a backup.
It understands both ways Alacritty does themes: separate theme files, and colours written directly into your config. If yours are inline, one click promotes them into a reusable theme file.
-
🔤 Fonts — the same table pattern, with a filterable picker listing the monospace fonts actually installed on your system
-
⌨ Bindings — edited cell by cell. Move across
Key | Mods | Action | Charsand change each part with the right kind of editor. New bindings show in orange, deletions in struck-through red, and Alacritty's own defaults are shown read-only so you can see what you're overriding. -
🗂 Backup & Restore — a timestamped backup before every change, kept in
~/.config/alacritty/backups/
Nothing is written until you press Save. Staged changes are marked ⏳ so you always know what's pending.
Generated from the running app — python docs/screenshots/generate.py re-renders the gallery each release, so they never go stale.
Dashboard
Config — editing in place, with a dropdown at the cell
Config — the filterable font picker
Themes — preview and stage
Theme preview
Bindings — cell-level editing
Shortcuts
- Linux, with Alacritty installed
- Python 3.11 or newer
python-textual,python-rich,python-tomli-wforgekit0.3.0 or newer — the shared foundation for Forge apps
yay -S alacrittyforgeThen run alacrittyforge.
sudo pacman -S python-textual python-rich python-tomli-w
git clone https://github.com/jetomev/alacrittyforge.git
cd alacrittyforge
python main.pypip install textual rich tomli-w
git clone https://github.com/jetomev/alacrittyforge.git
cd alacrittyforge
python main.pyalacrittyforgeNo
sudoneeded. alacrittyForge only ever writes to your own configuration at~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml, and its backups next to it.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Ctrl+D or 1 |
Dashboard |
Ctrl+C or 2 |
Config |
Ctrl+T or 3 |
Themes |
Ctrl+F or 4 |
Fonts |
Ctrl+B or 5 |
Bindings |
? or Ctrl+H |
Shortcuts window |
Esc |
Close the open window |
q / Ctrl+Q |
Quit |
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
E / Enter |
Edit the selected value in place |
S |
Save everything staged (confirms, then backs up) |
R |
Reload from disk |
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
P / Enter |
Preview the selected theme |
A |
Apply the staged theme |
H |
Installation guide |
F5 |
Refresh the theme list |
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
←↑↓→ |
Move between cells |
E / Enter |
Edit the cell under the cursor |
N |
Stage a new binding |
D |
Stage or unstage a deletion |
S |
Save everything staged |
alacrittyforge/
├── main.py # Entry point
├── alacrittyforge/
│ ├── app.py # The application shell
│ ├── config_manager.py # Reads, validates and writes the TOML config
│ ├── backup_manager.py # Create, list, restore and delete backups
│ ├── theme_manager.py # Finds themes, reads their colours, applies them
│ ├── font_manager.py # Font settings
│ ├── keybind_manager.py # Keybindings, including Alacritty's defaults
│ ├── field_options.py # Which settings have fixed options, and what they are
│ ├── screens/ # One file per section
│ └── widgets/ # Status line and the filterable picker
├── docs/ # Changelog, roadmap, screenshots
├── testing/ # Test matrix and results per version
└── LICENSE
The menu bar, dialogs, theme and scrollbars come from forgekit, shared across the Forge apps.
alacrittyForge is built around one rule: never change your config without telling you.
Every change passes three checks:
- Validation — input is checked before it's staged
- Confirmation — a dialog asks before anything is written
- Backup — your current config is saved automatically first
Backups live in ~/.config/alacritty/backups/, keeping the 20 most recent.
- A colour picker for hex colour fields (swatches shipped in v0.2.0)
- A backup restore screen — backups are created automatically, but restoring one still means doing it by hand
- Notice when your config changed outside the app — remember what we last wrote, and if the file no longer matches, offer to accept it, restore ours, or save its colours as a theme
- Live preview of font changes
- Import and export configuration profiles
- Rebuilt on forgekit, the shared Forge foundation
- Config: one-table in-place editing — dropdowns at the cell, filterable pickers, colour swatches, and a fixed footer where Save is the only thing that writes
- Themes: preview-and-stage flow, support for both theming models, and one-click promotion of inline colours into a theme file
- Fonts: the same table pattern, with a monospace-only picker (486 families on the test machine — the filter earns its keep)
- Bindings: cell-level editing, with new, changed and deleted entries all saved together
- Fixed a silent trap: colours written directly in your config quietly override an imported theme, so applying a theme now clears them
- Staged edits survive switching screens
- One consistent way of reporting what happened, across every screen
- Help window toggles instead of stacking
- Screen keys work as soon as you arrive, without clicking first
- Confirmation dialogs:
Esccancels,Enterconfirms - Published on the AUR
Older entries live in docs/ROADMAP.md.
The forgekit redesign. alacrittyForge became the second Forge app built on the shared foundation — and the release where the in-place editing style was invented.
The idea: one table per section, with values edited where they live. Settings with fixed options open a dropdown right at the cell, long lists open a filterable picker, free text opens a small editor. Staged changes are marked ⏳ in the table, and a fixed footer at the bottom holds the only button that writes anything.
Three rounds of hands-on review shaped it, and the shared foundation grew form styling and simpler window-closing along the way — improvements every other Forge app inherited.
One bug fixed here is worth calling out, because it's invisible until it bites you: colours written directly in alacritty.toml silently override any theme you import. You apply a theme, nothing appears to happen, and there's no error. Applying a theme now clears those inline colours first.
New dependency: forgekit 0.3.0 or newer, packaged on the AUR as python-forgekit. yay -S alacrittyforge pulls it in for you.
A hardening batch, closing six findings from an audit that borrowed grubForge's playbook.
- 🔒 Staged edits stopped disappearing. Switching away from a screen and back silently discarded everything you'd staged — the code that re-read from disk also reset the staging area. Reading and resetting are now separate things.
- 💬 One feedback channel. Every screen now reports through the same status line and toast, instead of five near-identical versions with their own inconsistent icons.
- ❓ The help window stopped stacking. Pressing
?twice used to open two of them. It now toggles, andEsc,qor?all close it. - 🎯 Keys work on arrival. Screen shortcuts used to be dead until you clicked into a panel first. Each screen now takes focus when you open it.
- ⌨ Confirmation dialogs got keyboard-friendly —
Esccancels,Enterconfirms, no tabbing onto a button.
Packaging: published on the AUR. The build now launches the app headlessly as a check, so a styling or startup error is caught while building rather than when you first run it.
The complete history lives in docs/CHANGELOG.md.
- KognogOS — the distribution alacrittyForge ships with
- forgekit — the shared foundation for the Forge apps
- nog — tier-aware package manager
- grubForge — bootloader manager
- bitlaForge — solo Bitcoin mining, honestly framed
jetomev — idea, vision, direction, testing
Claude (Anthropic) — co-developer, architecture, implementation
Built as a collaboration between a human with a good idea and an AI that helped bring it to life — one command at a time.
alacrittyForge is free software, released under the GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE for the full text.
Contributions are welcome — open an issue or a pull request.
If you find alacrittyForge useful, a star helps others find it.