Tmux Over SSH in Alacritty

Background/Problem

I have been using the Alacritty terminal emulator for a year or so now on my main machine (Arch Linux). Today I logged into a Raspberry Pi that I hadn’t used in ages via ssh. When I tried to start a tmux session, I got the following error message:

open terminal failed: missing or unsuitable terminal: alacritty

and tmux would not start.

It took me quite some time to figure out how to solve the issue.

Solution

The terminfo of Alacritty was missing on the Raspberry Pi.

I’m not sure if there is a quicker/easier way to install that info, but the following worked for me:

• Clone the Alacritty git repo and change into the directory:

git clone https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty.git
cd alacritty

• Run tic to install the terminfo:

sudo tic -xe alacritty,alacritty-direct extra/alacritty.info

And that was pretty much it. Afterwards I was able to start a tmux session from within Alacritty which I used to ssh into my Raspberry Pi.

Change Log

2022-09-20:

• Changed wording a little bit.
• Adjusted the formatting slightly.

Take care,
Andreas