Bugs. When you work all day long in a terminal, you need it to be reliable. As I mentioned above, xfce4-terminal is what I normally use but select-to-copy doesn't work 100% of the time. This is super annoying. I'd switch to rxvt but it has its own problems. Despite having had terminals for so much longer, *nix has fallen behind macOS when it comes to terminal usability and reliability.
I work literally all day long in multiple fullscreen gnome-terminal instances, and I can't remember the last time I encountered a "bug". It literally never crashes, and works perfectly for my use case.
I can imagine there could be bugs in esoteric terminal emulation, but for the typical use case of "TERM=xterm-256color" (or screen-256color) it works perfectly for my use case.
Plug: I maintain a fork of termite which doesn't require Daniel's patched VTE3 fork; and guts most of the exotic vimmy features.
I really like VTE's behaviour; even if the performance is a bit worse than XTerm (though worlds ahead of what I've seen on OSX with iTerm2 and Terminal.app). I rely on using iBus input methods in the terminal on a daily basis, and VTE handles this wonderfully.
I've also gutted a lot of stuff from termite in my own fork (overaly, vi mode, clickable urls) and it definitely makes for a lovely minimalistic terminal. I'm thankful for termite being so simple (granted the lifting is done by a lib) that this is possible without much effort.
I just wish I could log the scrollback buffer so that I could open an actual editor on it, but I don't think libvte exposes anything to do this.
Hey, thanks for the tip on Termite. I've been using it since reading your comment and it's awesome. Cut and paste and URL opening both work flawlessly!
There have been many times when vim starts glitching out or something because of the terminal emulator I'm using. Even well tested ones like X-term and gnome-terminal. I never had that problem using st.
We hack so much into a text interface it's really easy to accumulate bugs.
I use tmux+emacs inside gnome-terminal for 8+ hours a day.
I rarely (never?) see any "terminal glitching" except for the cases where I've done something absurdly wrong, like running a bash inside emacs-shell with the wrong setting for TERM.
Terminal emulation is essentially a solved problem (state machines and control code sets are small and well defined, there are many reference implementations and compatibility tests). If you see glitching, it's probably from what you're doing inside the terminal, not from the terminal itself.
Try spartan way for vim too. Used to have huge list of plugins and exotic vim hacks in my `.vimrc`, nowadays ain't even using plugin manager. `:colorscheme blue` and off you go.
xterm is a de facto standard, in that you can sit down in front of a machine which appears to be running some flavour of Unix, it doesn't matter if it's Gnome, KDE, TWM, CDE, etc., GNU or BSD or Solaris or whatever, you'll probably be able to find xterm and work out the rest from there.
Many devs/hackers use xterm as their day-to-day terminal, and seem to approximate ANSI control code compliance with "works in xterm".
The problem with this situation, as mentioned on the st page, is that xterm is unmaintained and unmaintainable.
st is trying to be a maintainable replacement, making improvements like vector fonts, and not being shy about ignoring legacy/niche/solved-elsewhere features.
- I dispute "many devs/hackers use xterm". I switched away from xterm over 20 years ago, when it was clear that they were never going to have good support for anti-aliased fonts. I work heavily in the linux and with linux devs, and I can't remember the last time I saw someone using an xterm on a modern system.
- xterm is for exactly the case you describe: when all you have is "base X11" and you need a terminal. No crazy multi-gigabyte toolkit requirements. Its essentially a fallback/recovery tool for these cases, although I prefer just working on console when things get that bad.
- xterm's codebase is 30+ years old. "unmaintainable" seems like an overstatement, by a longshot.
This appears to be true (from other comments on terminal performance in this thread) but other VTE-based terminals (gnome-terminal) have high performance and work great on sub-1GHz class machines.
