Sorry to hear you ran into problems. Start up time is pretty fast for me (~0.1-0.2 s). If it is slower than a second, I am very concerned. Please open an issue (with the results of the xonfig) so we can work through what is going wrong. Your workflow sounds similar to mine.
As per the pulldown terminals, do you mean the dropdown menus? If so this can be avoided by using the readline shell instead of the prompt-toolkit one.
Thank you for the response! For me, the startup time ranges between 0.3-0.45 seconds. I have an old i5 3rd Gen processor. Presumably, your system is faster. This should give you an idea of the timing of my shells, compared to the latest git checkout of xonsh:
Do you think the difference is large enough to warrant a bug report?
I don't mean dropdown menus; "pulldown" was my misnomer. I meant dropdown terminal emulators like Guake, Terminator, Yakuake, etc. They are meant to be running in the background, and swoop down on pressing a hot key, inspired by "~" opening a console in Quake games.
Totally agree that the comparison table is flattering. The purpose of the front page for a project is to make it look good. This is one of the few places a project has that opportunity. Happy to update it if you notice any thing wrong or would like to see additional rows or columns.
As per the pulldown terminals, do you mean the dropdown menus? If so this can be avoided by using the readline shell instead of the prompt-toolkit one.