Here’s the Deal

rxvt-unicode vs Termite

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When comparing rxvt-unicode vs Termite, the Slant community recommends rxvt-unicode for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux terminal emulators?” rxvt-unicode is ranked 1st while Termite is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose rxvt-unicode is:

Rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM.

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Common Questions

What are the best Linux terminal emulators?

What are the best Linux terminal emulators for low-resource machines?

Pros

Pro
Low memory usage

Rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM.

Pro
Can be daemonized to reduce resource usage

For those who want to lower their system's resource usage, rxvt-unicode allows for daemonization. This way you can run several instances of urxvt inside a single process.

Pro
Supports multiple font types

Multiple font types can be displayed flawlessly in rxvt-unicode.

Pro
Supports terminal transparency

Changing the transparency of the terminal is allowed for in rxvt-unicode. This not only makes for eye candy but is also good for GUI usability.

Pro
Minimum dependencies and simple text config

Pro
High performance

Rxvt-unicode is much faster than most alternatives.

Pro
Unicode support

International language support is provided through Unicode.

Pro
Fast text rendering

Rxvt-unicode has very fast text rendering, being able to render hundreds of MB of text in a very short time.

Pro
Built-in Perl interpreter

It has a built-in Perl interpreter, meaning that no install is needed. Simply run urxvtperl.

Pro
Handles bold text colour properly

Displays characters with text attribute bold actually as bold glyphs.

Pro
Proper wrapping support

During selection and pasting wrapped text doesn't break into lines at place of wrapping.

Pro
Minimal terminal emulator

Termite is a minimalistic terminal emulator. It does not need too many resources to run and it's designed primarily to work with window managers.

Pro
Vim-like behavior

Termite supports a command mode which is very useful if you prefer to use Vim-like keybindings. It takes inspiration from Vim, one of the most popular text editors, so someone who is used to Vim's commands will find themselves at home.

Pro
24-bit "True Color" support

Termite supports true color palettes, meaning that it allows for up to 16,777,216 possible colors.

Pro
Works great with a tiling window manager

Termite is most suited to a tiling window manager with a simple config file.

Pro
Simple configuration

Termite is easy to configure. Reconfiguration does not require logging out or rebooting.

Pro
Simple font resizing

You can just press Ctrl-PLUS, Ctrl-MINUS or Ctrl-EQUALS to change font size.

Pro
Display images

Ranger image preview works in termite.

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Cons

Con
Requires work to look acceptable

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.

Con
Unicode characters that are too wide are blanked instead of clipped

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.

Con
Requires work to configure useful functionality (clickable URL's, font scaling, tabs)

Con
In daemon mode you can lose all your terminals

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.

Con
Unicode rendering is buggy

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

Con
No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"

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

Con
Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel

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

Con
Bloated

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

Con
No option to have a "reverse color" cursor

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.