How to uninstall Alacritty on Mac

Alacritty is a terminal emulator you download as a dmg from its GitHub releases; Homebrew disabled the alacritty cask on September 1, 2026 because it fails Gatekeeper's check, though an install made through Homebrew before that date still uninstalls normally. Save any terminal sessions or unfinished work in other apps first, since quitting a terminal emulator ends whatever is running inside it.

Quit and remove the app

1. Press Command + Q inside Alacritty, or close each of its windows, then check Activity Monitor for alacritty and confirm no process is left.
2. Move Alacritty.app from Finder's Applications folder to the Trash.

Where Alacritty keeps data

Alacritty's documented UNIX search order is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty/alacritty.toml, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/alacritty.toml, $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml, $HOME/.alacritty.toml, then /etc/alacritty/alacritty.toml. Check the actual file you use, including any imported configuration. An XDG variable denotes the folder you configured, not a literal Finder path; system-wide /etc configuration is separate from this app's user data. Alacritty configuration docs

On the test Mac neither config path had ever been created, so Alacritty was still running on its defaults. If you've customized colors, fonts or keybindings, check your active configuration, not just the two home-directory candidates in the table.

Check the result

pgrep -il alacritty
ls -d ~/.config/alacritty ~/.alacritty.toml
command -v alacritty

• No output from pgrep means no Alacritty process is running.
• ls -d prints each path that exists and reports "No such file or directory" for the rest; keep whichever one holds your settings.
• command -v alacritty printing nothing means no alacritty command resolves on your current PATH. A printed path may come from Homebrew, another installation or a manual link; inspect its source first, and use the Homebrew command below only if Homebrew lists this cask as installed.

If you installed it with Homebrew

Homebrew disabled the alacritty cask on September 1, 2026 because it fails Gatekeeper's check, so it can no longer be installed with brew install --cask alacritty; an existing Homebrew install still removes normally. Homebrew Alacritty cask

A plain Homebrew uninstall removes the app together with what the cask linked into place: the alacritty command, its manual pages, shell completions and two terminfo entries under ~/.terminfo/61. The zap list adds only your preferences file and saved window state, both selected by default in Mole, and doesn't name your configuration file. When Mole removes a Homebrew install it leaves --zap out if you untick either of those two rows. To remove the app and its linked files while keeping everything else:

brew uninstall --cask alacritty

What Mole lists

For Alacritty installed from its GitHub release, or from a Homebrew cask installed before September 1, 2026:

• Your preferences file and saved window state are selected by default.
• Mole lists ~/.config/alacritty and ~/.alacritty.toml, the two configuration paths Alacritty documents, as review rows, unselected while Remove data and settings with apps is off, the default. Enabling the option can preselect eligible app-owned data; untick them to keep settings. Neither path existed on the test Mac.
• The command, manual pages, completions and terminfo entries a Homebrew install links into place are removed by Homebrew's own uninstall, not listed as Mole rows.

What this test covered

Alacritty 0.17.0 was installed from its official GitHub release dmg, not the Homebrew cask, and uninstalled on September 17, 2026, with Mole Preview 272, alongside other apps in the same batch. No configuration file had been created on the test Mac, so neither ~/.config/alacritty nor ~/.alacritty.toml existed to be listed; the removal took the app and its folder in the system's per-user cache. A Homebrew install was not tested.