gemini://warmedal.se/~bjorn/posts/2023-09-14-are-you-a-terminal-emulator-hipster.gmi

xterm, because it comes with OpenBSD. xterm is bloated, but finding (or writing) something more suitable would be a pain. Rarely urxvt if a silly game needs it; urxvt buffers better; you can see a flicker in xterm if the code is bad and sprays escape sequences, a lot. Otherwise not urxvt as there are a few annoyances I'd have to figure out how to fix, and there's no tuits there, especially given that xterm is mostly good enough.

On the 2009 macbook with the spinny metal disk (RIP 2022) it was some version of iTerm, though that was problematic as one could not actually disable colors; you could only set all the light colors to white and dark colors to black, and then readability might suffer if something did something problematic. xterm meanwhile you can put xterm*colorMode:false into the ~/.Xdefaults file and you're good. Sometimes bloat is handy, if there's a knob you need.

I have looked around, though not much:

Alacritty crashed if you chained 17 or more escape sequences, which did not impress me, and the compile time was ludicrously slow on the 2009 macbook, which meant that Rust got itself very deep into the "unusable" bucket.

gnome-shell on Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 gets an honorable mention for leaking memory and needing a cron job to kill off instances that had gotten too large. (I mostly used SSH from the OpenBSD desktop to get to the linux boxen.)

st (of suckless) had annoying defaults, whereby some common key combination I hit caused some annoying mode change, and I didn't have the tuits to dive into the source and rectify that.

So, xterm. Eh.

vi-in-tmux-in-xterm.png

CWM is kinda negligent on window decorations, if you're wondering why there is not a title bar. More room for xterm that way.

Probably if you are younger you might want to look around more as you may not have yet found something that works for you? Looking around too much gets into the "maybe the grass is greener over there?" territory, so there is probably a Goldilocks zone of looking around but not too much.

a silly game

xomb-in-urxvt.png

Excitement city.