I use xterm for the same reason. It's really fast and lightweight in terms of memory usage and dependencies. With a tiling window manager, I don't need many fea

I use xterm for the same reason. It's really fast and lightweight in terms of memory usage and dependencies. With a tiling window manager, I don't need many features other terminals provide. urxvt feels closer in terms of latency, and offers some extra features. A slight annoyance is that since xterm is quite old, it doesn't stick to some conventional X variables and renders colors in a slightly inconsistent way. So configuration of e.g. fonts requires an extra line or two in .Xresources. And if you run redshift, it looks a bit different than other applications. Since xterm is seeing active development again, I hope some of this gets fixed. Only eshell feels slightly faster, something that this post kind of confirms. Eshell is a very interesting alternative to classical shells. Too bad it's a bit unfinished and sparsely documented.