at 3:21 PM Termite VTE-based terminal discontinued, dev recommends migrating to Alacritty
Free and open source VTE-based terminal Termite has been officially discontinued, with the development team putting out a statement recommending users switch to Alacritty instead.
The developer of Termite, Daniel Micay, has officially archived the software's GitHub repository and recommends migrating to the still actively developed Alacritty. Micay explains this recommendation by comparing features and user interfaces between the two apps. He states that Alacritty 0.8 implements a "generic regex hints mode comparable to Termite's URL hints mode." The features and improvements present in the Alacritty 0.8 release candidate are what makes it "the only proper replacement for Termite," according to the recommendation statement.
Micay highly recommends people don't continue with forking Termite for their own use due to VTE being "a terrible base for building a modern, fast and safe terminal emulator," citing it as "slow, brittle and difficult to improve." According to him, the development team behind VTE has "gone out of the way to keep useful APIs private due to hostility towards implementing any kind of user interface beyond what they provide," saying that this and other issues are simply "the tip of the iceberg" when it comes to the VTE devs' hostility towards its use as anything other than the de facto GNOME Terminal widget.
Like Termite, Alacritty is also free and open source, and it is written in Rust, an active programming language. Its rendering is also based on OpenGL, so it is more efficient than Termite too. Alacritty is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows via its official GitHub releases page.