- I dispute "many devs/hackers use xterm". I switched away from xterm over 20 years ago, when it was clear that they were never going to have good support for

- I dispute "many devs/hackers use xterm". I switched away from xterm over 20 years ago, when it was clear that they were never going to have good support for anti-aliased fonts. I work heavily in the linux and with linux devs, and I can't remember the last time I saw someone using an xterm on a modern system. - xterm is for exactly the case you describe: when all you have is "base X11" and you need a terminal. No crazy multi-gigabyte toolkit requirements. Its essentially a fallback/recovery tool for these cases, although I prefer just working on console when things get that bad. - xterm's codebase is 30+ years old. "unmaintainable" seems like an overstatement, by a longshot.