Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing xterm vs Extraterm, 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 Extraterm is ranked 40th. 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 speed
not the fastest ever, but for me its a good comprimise of features vs performance
Pro Cross platform
Pro Supports tab, splits and panes
You can set up your own layout with multiple splits and tabs.
Pro Shell integration
The shell integration makes it possible to group in command output in "frames" which show success/failure.
Pro Image support
You can view images and other data types like audio directly in the terminal.
Pro Keyboard based text selection
It is possible to go into a cursor mode where you can select text just like in a text editor. It even supports multiple cursors.
Pro Global shortcuts
You can configure global shortcuts to open the terminal.
Pro Keyboard friendly "Command Palette"
Just like Sublime, Atom and VSCode you can easily search and find commands from the drop down Command Palette.
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.
