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Add to SafariWhen comparing xterm vs Gnome Terminal, the Slant community recommends xterm for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” xterm is ranked 13th while Gnome Terminal is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose xterm is:
Xterm is a very lightweight terminal. It requires few resources, allowing it to run well even on lower-end machines.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
Xterm is a very lightweight terminal. It requires few resources, allowing it to run well even on lower-end machines.
Pro Used in almost every Linux distribution
If you master xterm, you won't have to learn another tty, since it is in almost every Linux distribution.
Pro Stable, well-tested
Pro Standard with X Window system
Xterm is installed as standard software with the X Window system, and is there even when installing other terminal emulators.
Pro Supports sixel images
Pro Shows full characters for wide fallback fonts
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.
Pro In about 30 years, it had only one issue, and that was fixed quickly
Pro It is fast and responsive
See this.
Pro Many modern terminals emulate xterm
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.
Pro Configurable via Xresources
X Toolkit resources and xrdb predates what is currently called "theme". Although one needs to read man, mitigates most listed cons
Pro Good integration with other GNOME-Shell apps
Gnome Terminal integrates well into Gnome Desktop, as well as the rest of the core Gnome Shell apps.
Pro Exceptionally fast
The Gnome Terminal is usually very fast. It boots up very quickly and takes less than a second (averages to 0.25-0.59 seconds) to display files of up to 600 MB.
Pro Support for tabs
Gnome Terminal allows for the use of tabs by right clicking in the terminal window and selecting open new tab or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+t by default.
Pro Supports scrolling
You can scroll up and down in Gnome terminal. And if you wish to do so, you can also hide the scrollbar.
Pro Solarized colors
Gnome Terminal comes with a solarized colorscheme installed and ready to use.
Pro Content re-flow when window is resized
When using the GNOME Terminal, if you have long lines of text inside it and then you change the window, the text will also automatically update according to the new window size.
Pro Notifications upon command completion
This isn't in the current release but in development versions you get notifications when commands are complete. This is great for long-running commands, relieving you from continuously checking to see if your command is done.
Pro Configurable keybindings
Configurable key bindings can be used for copy-paste, sending SIGINT, switching tabs, and so on.
Pro Transparency
We can change the alpha canal and see through the terminal.
Pro Open Source
Pro Drop-down support
Drop-down functionality can be added to Gnome Terminal via an extension.
Pro Clever memory management
Multiple terminals are managed from one gnome-terminal instance that takes up about 45 MB. Adding on other instances (with 10k lines of used buffer), each terminal requires about 16 MB of memory.
Pro Getting better and better over time
Tilix used to surpass gnome-terminal but right now they are both the best options unless you have special needs.
Cons
Con No native transparency
Xterm does not natively support transparency (though it can be emulated if needs be).
Con Bad defaults
Very small default size. No way to know to how to configure size.
Con No tabs
Con It blinks
If it blinks for you too, you can try this: man xterm and then press Shift+G.
Con Has few dependencies
Has dependencies like xbitmaps.
Con Historical source code
The stories behind terminal emulation beyond their classical representatives (of which xterm is simply the most long-lived) are somewhere inbetween subtly irritating to downright surreal.
Con No background transparency
While this used to be a good option, background transparency has been removed.
Con Gnome library dependencies
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.
Con Font rendering doesn't look good
it seems that everything is fatter per default.
Con Heavyweight
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.
Con No tab names
Since Gnome 3, the feature for manual renaming of tabs was reaped off.
Con Doesn't support font ligature still in 2019
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.
Con Incomplete vt handling due to using libvte
Con Restrictive license
