Terminal alternatives on Linux

I have used xterm for quite some time now since I want a simple terminal program that starts fast and keeps out of my way for most of the time. However, I miss some features from more advanced terminal programs so from time to time I take a look at alternatives.

I basically have the following requirements:

• Fast startup: I start the terminal from within my file manager quite often when starting external programs or directly working on command line tools so fast startup is important to me.

• Unicode/Ansi-Color support: The terminal must support unicode (utf-8 to be precise) encodings and must interpret ansi color codes.

• Searchable scrollback buffer: I want to be able to search in the output of previous commands which makes it much easier to work with command line tools.

xfce4-terminal

Since I use XFCE as my desktop environment it was clear to at least try xfce4-terminal.

Pros:

• nice color schemes out of the box
• searchable unlimited scrollback buffer (Ctrl-Shift-f)
• tab support

Cons:

• it is reasonable fast when using dbus to start a new window from an already running process, but the window does not always open in foreground with focus. From time to time the new terminal is in the background and I have to switch windows to access it.
• there is an option to not use existing process but then it is quite slow: Executing

     time xfce4-terminal --disable-server -x ls
     

  takes 0.25s on my i5-3120M with 8 GB of RAM

rxvt-unicode (urxvt)

Pros:

• fast:

     time urxvt -e ls
     

  takes 0.07s
• supports scrollback search (M-s)

Cons:

• configuration is done with x11 attributes (.Xdefaults)

urxvt is my current choice as it is fast and supports search. Some fancy features like tab support is only available via perl extensions and configuration is little bit hard since a graphical configuration is missing. But once configuration is done, it just keeps out of the way and does its job.

Here are my x11 settings for .Xdefaults:

URxvt.foreground: #d3d7cf
URxvt.background: #2e3436
URxvt.saveLines: 1000000

urxvt supports Xft font rendering. You can select a Xft font as follows:

urxvt.font: xft:Misc Fixed:style=SemiCondensed:pixelsize=13

lxterminal

Pros:

• reasonable fast

     time lxterminal -e ls
     

  takes 0.15s
• graphical configuration and optional menu
• tab support

Cons:

• no searchable scrollback buffer

gnome-terminal

Pro:

• graphical configuration and optional menu
• tab support

Cons:

• slow

     time gnome-terminal -e ls
     

  takes 0.3s

Other terminals

Here's a quick list of other terminals I checked:

• mate-terminal: did not run without other mate components
• sakura: simple terminal
• terminology: fancy implementation but still only basic terminal support
• terminus: another simple terminal
• tilix: slow, but interesting multi-session, tiling concept. If you use screen or tmux but want a more graphical implementation, you may want to check this out.