Alacritty fans? How to find the editing file

Bhibb

Hey all I saw some awesome set ups on the "Show your Solus" thread and I decided to give Alacritty a try. It looks awesome! I just don't know where to edit/find the config file. The git page says it should be in a few different spots:

Alacritty doesn't create the config file for you, but it looks for one in the following locations:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.yml
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.yml
$HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml
$HOME/.alacritty.yml

But I can only find it in /usr/share/alacritty/alacritty.yml and when I edit it and restart Alacritty, nothing changes. Maybe I'm just not editing it right. I'm trying to take the border off with the:

#decorations: full

#decorations: none

but when I save the config file and restart alacritty, nothing changes. Could anyone provide any help?

EbonJaeger

Bhibb The config should be in .config/alacritty/alacritty.yml, starting from your home directory. When the file is saved, the changes take effect instantly, so you shouldn't have to restart (well, for most options).

Also lines starting with a # are comments, so you would have to uncomment the line that the option is on for it to be read.

Bhibb

EbonJaeger Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work. I had to create the directory in ~/.config/alacritty/ and copy the alacritty.yml to that folder in order for it to line up like you say. Even then, when I comment out settings in this config file (in both directories under /usr/share/alacritty and ~/.config/alacritty) nothing changes. I've commented out several fields and changed the default parameters (Windowed to Fullscreen, Title, full to none) and nothing is changing.

EbonJaeger

Bhibb Yes, you have to create the directory, it doesn't exist by default.

Can you show your full config? I'm betting that there's parts that have to be uncommented still; those settings you mentioned are in sections, which also have to be uncommented. For example, from my own config:

cursor:
  style:
    shape: Beam

Bhibb

EbonJaeger Hey, thank you a lot. So while I was pasting in my huge config file I saw that it looked funny so I opened it in Atom rather than Vim and saw the hierarchy that you're talking about. Once I uncommented the # at "window" the whole thing worked. Thank you very much for your time. TIL!

EbonJaeger

Bhibb Glad everything works! Also as a note for pasting file text where syntax matters (as in config files), either enclose it in ```, or upload it to pastebin.com if it's really long. That makes it much more readable, and take up less space 🙂