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Add to SafariWhen comparing xterm vs kitty, the Slant community recommends xterm for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux terminal emulators for low-resource machines?” xterm is ranked 6th while kitty is ranked 8th. 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 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.
Pro Supports sixel images
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 Extensible Kitten framework
Supports plugins to add features one at a time for those who need them. Examples include Unicode input and side-by-side diffs.
Pro Window tiling
Very elegant keyboard shortcuts for creating and navigating between tiled terminals within each tab with no appreciable lag.
Pro Tabs for multiple instances
Operate several terminals from one window using the tabs feature, allowing you to make simultaneous connections to different remote hosts.
Pro Controlled and configured from the shell prompt within the program itself
No graphical menus to clutter the screen saves system resources and time once you learn that all those options are still available from the command line within the app.
Pro Scrollback buffer viewer
Allows for viewing the scrollback buffer in an external pager of your choice ('less' by default, with support for 'more' and 'most'), a huge benefit for turning actions taken in a live terminal session into a script for efficiency or dissemination or collaborating on workflows.
Cons
Con Bad defaults
Very small default size. No way to know to how to configure size.
Con No Tabs
Con It blinks.
Try this: man xterm and then press Shift+G
Con Has few dependencies
Has dependencies like xbitmaps.
Con No native transparency
Xterm does not natively support transparency (though it can be emulated if needs be).
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.
