Troubles with terminals

[jgarst]

I would like to use a terminal that:

1. Feels zippy (low latency)
2. Supports Plex, and as many unicode characters as possible
3. Is stable

Alacritty:

• easier to set up than other options.
• portable to other operating systems.
• might feel slightly slower than xterm and urxvt
• has been manageably unstable
• does not update properly when hidpi is set with the xrandr --scale 2x2 option

It is no fun to fix scaling problems moments before presenting, or stumble into a set of unsupported X11 parameters. For X11 the updating problems are a showstopping bug. I might be able to dodge the issue by doing a less dynamic configuration of X11, but as long as I am using virtual machines with anonymous monitors that isn't an option either. Probably the right choice for sway, which is probably the future

Urxvt:

• more difficult to configure
• not portable to other operating systems
• feels zippy
• Using monospaced plex causes all gliphs to be double wide.

The font issue can be avoided by using xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:size=16 as the font instead, but I have elected to use xterm instead because of this.

XTerm:

• more difficult to configure
• not portable to other operating systems
• feels zippy

The current terminal of choice. My preferences will probably change as I get more invested in specific customization options.

[jgarst]

XTerm is continuing to work, but feels a little rougher than Alacritty. The scrollback sometimes does funny things with vim.

I'm looking forward to switching to alacritty someday, but that someday might be a bit out.