Here’s the Deal

xterm vs Termite

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When comparing xterm vs Termite, the Slant community recommends Termite for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux terminal emulators?” Termite is ranked 2nd while xterm is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Termite is:

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.

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best Linux terminal emulators?

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

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
In about 30 years, it had only one issue, and that was fixed quickly

Pro
It is fast and responsive.

See https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/

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
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
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
No native transparency

Xterm does not natively support transparency (though it can be emulated if needs be).

Con
It blinks.

Try this: man xterm and then press Shift+G

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.