I wasn't talking about startup speed as that can be ignored given the kind of shells and configs we use these days which will consume most of the start time. W

I wasn't talking about startup speed as that can be ignored given the kind of shells and configs we use these days which will consume most of the start time. What I was talking about were things like how much memory overhead the emulator has and how fast it paints stuff or how quickly it responds. Some things were slower in urxvt and then some things didn't work as correctly as in xterm, so I didn't bother configuring urxvt for more speed. st, on the other hand, wasn't faster and actually was heavier memory-wise when I tried it the last time.