xterm vs Alacritty

Xterm is a very lightweight terminal. It requires few resources, allowing it to run well even on lower-end machines.

If you master xterm, you won't have to learn another tty, since it is in almost every Linux distribution.

Xterm is installed as standard software with the X Window system, and is there even when installing other terminal emulators.

Many terminal emulators that deal with wider fallback fonts (i.e. double-wide characters in CJK fonts) truncate display of wide characters, show Unicode "missing glyph" characters, or simply fail to display the characters at all. XTerm is "smart" enough to simply take up the extra space needed to show such wide characters.

See this.

Many terminal applications, such as OS X's Terminal.app and iTerm2 (among others), all claim xterm or xterm- variants as their $TERM and aim for support of xterm's escape sequences. Many command-line applications will assume or even hard-code escape-sequences and behavior for xterm and those terminals emulating it.

X Toolkit resources and xrdb predates what is currently called "theme". Although one needs to read man, mitigates most listed cons

Written in Rust with a philosophy focusing on speed and simplicity, Alacritty is one of the fastest terminal emulators out there.

Alacritty looks very slick on Linux, especially with GNOME or i3.

The configuration file is very well made and easy to use. You can fine tune your preferences to perfection in a matter of minutes.

Alacritty can be configured to adjust line spacing (height), letter spacing (width), and individual character horizontal/vertical positions.

It's simple and fast like xterm or urxvt but with truecolor support which is a big plus if you use a terminal based code editor. Basically Alacritty has all the features you need and nothing you don't (if you're using tmux for multiplexing).