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Comment by Steltek | Hacker News Reader

I use xterm because I'm too lazy to switch, I guess. It was never bad enough for me to switch and it's present virtually everywhere, so I don't need to bother installing my favorite niche term (kind of like sticking with bash when zsh was indisputably more awesome).

To the best of my knowledge, one downside is the text rendering is synchronous. Read a character off the tty, try to display it on the screen. It's fine until you go and cat /dev/mem or something like that. Many GNOME-ish terminals use vte which drops frames if it can't keep up rendering.

I also run into problems with bad display managers or DEs that don't load ~/.Xresources or ~/.Xdefaults (looking at you Debian gdm).

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I use xterm because it's one of the only terminal emulators that allows me to disable the alt-screen (titeInhibit). Apparently I'm one of the few, but when I vi/view a file and exit, or read a man page and go back to the command line, I still want to be able to reference what I was just looking at.

Absolutely! I often use cat in tmux instead of less because of this. Will try xterm now, too.

You can use the -X option to less to avoid it clearing the screen. To set this option by default, put "export LESS=-X" on your profile.

If you want the same sane behavior for vim, add "set t_ti= t_te=" to your .vimrc.

Indeed, but it's more painful to get these things set across all the systems and accounts I use, even given Ansible. Doable, but titeInhibit is kind of nice. :-)

With Kitty, which I've been playing with and doesn't support titeInhibit, it requires deploying a termcap package everywhere, which is also painful, but I ended up building a version with those escape codes removed, which was kind of a benefit of having to use and deploy a custom termcap.

In addition to the sibling comment, tmux has the per-pane option 'alternate-screen'. You can set its default with 'set-option -g alternate-screen off'

> Many GNOME-ish terminals use vte which drops frames if it can't keep up rendering.

Cannot you that with Xterm too?

XTerm*fastScroll: true

> To the best of my knowledge, one downside is the text rendering is synchronous.

I find this to be a feature, it's part of what makes xterm a terminal emulator.

There's a speedhack in recent xterm that makes it behave more like libvte, but I forgot the incantation to enable it.

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