xterm vs kitty

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.

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

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.

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.

Very elegant keyboard shortcuts for creating and navigating between tiled terminals within each tab with no appreciable lag.

Operate several terminals from one window using the tabs feature, allowing you to make simultaneous connections to different remote hosts.

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.

Supports plugins to add features one at a time for those who need them. Examples include Unicode input and side-by-side diffs.

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.