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Add to SafariWhen comparing xterm vs Pantheon 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 Pantheon Terminal is ranked 17th. 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.
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 End process notifications
When a process has ended, Pantheon Terminal sends a notification bubble to the desktop notification server and indicates which tab generated the notification.
Pro Can easily restore a previous session
Pantheon Terminal remembers the window size, position, windowed/maximized/fullscreen state, and open tabs in between sessions.
Pro Advanced tab handling
Using the Granite Dynamic Notebook widget (which includes tab close history), double click the tab bar for a new tab, duplicating tabs, quickly closing all other tabs, auto-hiding/revealing tab close buttons, etc.
Pro Smart copy and paste
The keyboard shortcut for copy + paste is intelligently adapted andnbased on text selection and clipboard state. This makes it possible to use standard copy + paste shortcuts without colliding with standard ctrl + c behavior in the Terminal.
Pro Search feature
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 Heavy
Con limited customization options
Con RAM usage increases considerably over time
There is a RAM leak when using the Pantheon Terminal that adds up over time and use.
Con Incompatible with LTS Ubuntu
Pantheon is developed and binaries are released for a near blessing edge operating system (elementary OS). As such, installing it on an LTS Ubuntu system may be nearly impossible without replacing a large portion of the LTS stack that Ubuntu-targeted software expects.
Con Restrictive license
