I've said before in various contexts ( eg ) that I'm very attached to the venerable xterm as my terminal (emulator) program, and I'm not looking forward to the day that I may have to migrate away from it due to Wayland (although I probably can keep running it under XWayland, now that I think about it). But I've never tried to write down a list of the things that make me so attached to it over other alternatives like urxvt, much less more standard ones like gnome-terminal. Today I'm going to try to do that, although my list is probably going to be incomplete.

• Xterm's ziconbeep feature , which I use heavily. Urxvt can have an equivalent but I don't know if other terminal programs do.

• I routinely use xterm's very convenient way of making large selections , which is supported in urxvt but not in gnome-terminal (and it can't be since gnome-terminal uses mouse button 3 for its own purposes).

• The ability to turn off all terminal colours, because they often don't work in my preferred terminal colours . Other terminal programs have somewhat different and sometimes less annoying colours, but it's still far to easy for programs to display things in unreadable colours.

  Yes, I can set my shell environment and many programs to not use colours, but I can't set all of them; some modern programs simply always use colours on terminals. Xterm can be set to completely ignore them.

• I'm very used to xterm's specific behavior when it comes to what is a 'word' for double-click selection. You can read the full details in the xterm manual page's section on character classes . I'm not sure if it's possible to fully emulate this behavior in other terminal programs; I once made an incomplete attempt in urxvt , while gnome-terminal is quite different and has little or no options for customizing that behavior (in the Gnome way). Generally the modern double click selection behavior is too broad for me.

  (For instance, I'm extremely attached to double-click selecting only individual directories in full paths, rather than the entire thing. I can always swipe to select an entire path, but if I can't pick out individual path elements with a double click my only choice is character by character selection, which is a giant pain.)

  Based on a quick experiment, I think I can make KDE's konsole behave more or less the way I want by clearing out its entire set of "Word characters" in profiles. I think this isn't quite how xterm behaves but it's probably close enough for my reflexes.

• Xterm doesn't treat text specially because of its contents, for example by underlining URLs or worse, hijacking clicks on them to do things. I already have well evolved systems for dealing with things like URLs and I don't want my terminal emulator to provide any 'help'. I believe that KDE's konsole can turn this off, but gnome-terminal doesn't seem to have any option for it.

• Many of xterm's behaviors can be controlled from command line switches. Some other terminal emulators (like gnome-terminal) force you to bundle these behaviors together as 'profiles' and only let you select a profile. Similarly, a lot of xterm's behavior can be temporarily changed on the fly through its context menus, without having to change the profile's settings (and then change them back).

• Every xterm window is a completely separate program that starts from scratch, and xterm is happy to run on remote servers without complications; this isn't something I can say for all other competitors. Starting from scratch also means things like not deciding to place yourself where your last window was, which is konsole's behavior (and infuriates me).

Of these, the hardest two to duplicate are probably xterm's double click selection behavior of what is a word and xterm's large selection behavior. The latter is hard because it requires the terminal program to not use mouse button 3 for a popup menu.

I use some other xterm features, like key binding , including duplicating windows , but I could live without them, especially if the alternate terminal program directly supports modern cut and paste in addition to xterm's traditional style. And I'm accustomed to a few of xterm's special control characters , especially Ctrl-space, but I think this may be pretty universally supported by now (Ctrl-space is in gnome-terminal).

There are probably things that other terminal programs like konsole, gnome-terminal and so on do that I don't want them to (and that xterm doesn't). But since I don't use anything other than xterm (and a bit of gnome-terminal and once in a while a bit of urxvt), I don't know what those undesired features are. Experimenting with konsole for this entry taught me some things I definitely don't want, such as it automatically placing itself where it was before (including placing a new konsole window on top of one of the existing ones, if you have multiple ones).

(This elaborates on a comment I made elsewhere .)