Geekery: #linux #debian #X11 #xterm

In 2025 I switched back to original xterm.

I had previously been using alacritty for several years, after a period of looking for a term-em that actually did all the things I wanted and wasn't too much of a pain in configuration or RAM use.

And before that I used rxvt (or urxvt) for about two decades.

Why did I switch this time? Because I did a quick review of about 40 term-ems in the course of a week, and was utterly astonished to find that xterm had acquired all the features that I actually wanted to use.

In the same way that I care about the fuel-efficiency of a car more than whether it's nominally a standard motor or a non-plugin-hybrid, I don't care about whether or not the term-em takes advantage of the graphics coprocessor to do the job. Do letters show up real fast? Great, I don't care how they got there.

But I want to be able to specify the fonts that I like, not have strange boxes show up when someone writes their name in a non-roman character set, use a bunch of colors, not show me the scrollbar but always have scrolling available, and not have weird bugs.

Since xterm is the only term-em I can approximately guarantee everything has been tested against, a bug that shows up as a result of using a particular term-em is least likely to manifest with xterm. Pragmatics.

I would like to extend kudos to the authors of Terminology, a term-em which, on first run, pops up a slider and asks you to adjust it until the font size is comfortable. That's worthy of a Galactic Prize for Extremely Obvious Cleverness.