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For people interested in playing around with different terminal emulators, you’d do yourself a service trying kitty [ https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty ]. It made my experience on high DPI screens far better. You can find it packaged up in the usual places (e.g. Debian).
I switched to kitty because it supports a killer feature I became accustomed to in iTerm- a keybind for "Open a new terminal in the same directory as the current terminal."
For people interested in playing around with different terminal emulators, you’d do yourself a service trying kitty [ https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty ]. It made my experience on high DPI screens far better. You can find it packaged up in the usual places (e.g. Debian).
> Offloads rendering to the GPU I don't understand this - isn't all rendering on a typical macOS or Linux desktop done via the GPU?
Does XTerm support unicode?
While Hackernews was busy grooming their Alacritty setup and holding drag races between it, iTerm, and whatever bloated terminal Microsoft came up with to see which could cat a huge file the fastest, I've been just using xterm. xterm -- it's the standard terminal emulator.
xterm:
* actually emulates a terminal and passes a set of compliance tests to determine how VT-compatible a terminal is (other TEs emulate xterm, poorly)
* is still compatible with bitmap fonts
* has a reputation for being slower than other TEs, but that's only because by default it doesn't cheat and commits every screen update. Other TEs, in order to increase their chances of winning the drag race, will skip updates they think you won't see. This can be enabled via a command-line option or X resource in xterm, but makes xterm less compatible.
* comes with every Linux or BSD distro and works fast on nearly any graphics adapter
Does XTerm support unicode?
OMG UTF8! Next I suppose someone will show me how to disable those !@#%ing colour control codes that always make my text blink? I don't want colour. I don't want syntax highlighting. I just want my old-school terminal. Mind you I'll probably have to sacrifice my cherished 8x15bold font (still installable after all these years) if I really want to go UTF8.
`xterm` lacks Wayland support-- a more secure alternative to X11. For a fast terminal with Wayland support, check out `alacritty` or foot: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot `foot` (foo terminal) benchmarks faster than alacritty and offers a client/server mode for even faster startup for new terminal windows.
I use xterm because I'm too lazy to switch, I guess. It was never bad enough for me to switch and it's present virtually everywhere, so I don't need to bother installing my favorite niche term (kind of like sticking with bash when zsh was indisputably more awesome). To the best of my knowledge, one downside is the text rendering is synchronous. Read a character off the tty, try to display it on the screen. It's fine…
I find this to be a feature, it's part of what makes xterm a terminal emulator.
There's a speedhack in recent xterm that makes it behave more like libvte, but I forgot the incantation to enable it.
OMG UTF8! Next I suppose someone will show me how to disable those !@#%ing colour control codes that always make my text blink? I don't want colour. I don't want syntax highlighting. I just want my old-school terminal. Mind you I'll probably have to sacrifice my cherished 8x15bold font (still installable after all these years) if I really want to go UTF8.
It doesn't support most(any?) of the bleeding-edge sequences for hyperlinks and underline styling.
It may have better input latency than xfce, but what are you running it on, a 486? Maybe for RPi, but—it has poor paint performance as well. It will flash if you try to do animation or scroll a complex screen. Bit of a toss up on the that front.
Anyway I find it useful for testing terminal sequences, but it's a tough sell as a daily driver. Things like tabs and a proper scrollbar are a minimum for me.