Gnome Terminal vs rxvt-unicode

While this used to be a good option, background transparency has been removed.

While not an issue if using Gnome, when trying to use this terminal in other desktop environments or window managers there will be a large amount of dependencies tied to the app making for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean this may be an issue.

it seems that everything is fatter per default.

To achieve a large amount of speed, Gnome Terminal has to use a relatively large amount of memory to run. It may eat up to 15-30 MB per instance, depending on the task it's doing.

Since Gnome 3, the feature for manual renaming of tabs was reaped off.

gnome-terminal uses vte for its terminal emulator, and vte simply doesn't support font ligature (yes, it's 2019). This is what its maintainer thinks about it.
He really thinks supporting font ligature breaks terminal's grid, like he doesn't understand a font that's monospace is a monospace no matter if it has ligature or not.

If a character in a backup font is wider than the base font, urxvt substitutes the non-displayable character. A large letter space will show the wide characters, but the result is not reasonably spaced. There is a patch from 2014 that the urxvt maintainer will not merge.

Out of the box, rxvt-unicode is not too pleasant to look at. Some understanding of Xresources is required for updating its appearance. That being said, the experience of customizing it can be very rewarding.

Because of sharing the same process terminal windows cannot be killed without sacrificing all other open windows. That becomes even more dangerous if you use multiple graphical managers without overriding socket with RXVT_SOCKET.

There are a few references to urxvt's buggy rendering, such as unicode combining characters, which bled through during scrolling.

Exists because Xterm is complete trash. Although it has a lot of features, you will most likely never use them all.

Though this is still not available, you can download the patched version for 24bit, here.

Sometimes you may need to enlarge the font to improve readability, or shrink it to have more real estate and "hawk's eye" view of data. In rxvt you need to change the configuration file or use these commands:

$ function fontsize 
     {printf '\33]50;%s%d\007' "xft:Dejavu Sans Mono:size=$1::antialias=false"}
$ fontsize 22

While you can choose the color of the cursor and the character under the cursor, there's no automatic "reverse color" for the cursor. This makes it impossible to use rxvt-unicode if you have a light background terminal and a dark background editor.