I've been using st-terminal[1] for 5-6 years at this point. It starts instantly, uses ~10mb of Ram and has almost zero latency. It's especially apparent on X11 without compositing enabled.

I tried ghostty the last year and I was instantly turned off by how much ram it hogs, but even more horrible was that it was using close to 10% cpu just sitting idly, doing absolutely nothing. It also felt at least twice as slow.

I need my terminal to display text, do scrollback and nothing else. I don't need gpu rendering, I don't need any fancy features, just be respectful to my system resources. Is it too much to ask?

[1] https://st.suckless.org/

Probably want `kitty --single-instance` to reduce memory usage when opening multiple.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/invocation/#cmdoption-kitty-...

I've tried kitty, alacritty, ghostty, wezterm, and konsole (all on X11), but I keep coming back to xfce4-terminal because it opens near instantly and has the least input latency of any of the other terminal emulators I've tried. It also uses very little memory in comparison (with 6 windows open and a fair bit in each scrollback buffer):

  Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used Program
  31.2 MiB +  10.7 MiB =  42.0 MiB xfce4-terminal

I've been on xterm since I've started using Linux seriously in 2008. I probably wouldnt have tested it because was probably a bit obscure then like it is now. It's not perfect, it's baroque, has terrible configurability, no tabs and an ugly context menu. But it's honestly the only usable terminal, none other has stuck with me. Most are far too sluggish to even start up. Then there is key input latency. Then some of the newer ones are only usable with good gpu support, but not from a VM like Virtualbox or maybe VMware where graphics isnt working great.

Another thing for a very long time has been that most other terminals don't support bitmap fonts. This was/is critical for lower DPI monitors. Today I've mostly made the switch to TTF fonts.

> I expected gnome-terminal's memory usage to be in line with konsole (KDE's default terminal), but gnome-terminal shows remarkably well in this test

In tipical GNOME fashion, they have decided to replace this largely working piece of software with on with one that places solidly at the bottom of the article's list (ptyxis).

foot also offers a client/server architecture. If you start a foot server (e.g. with a systemd service), you can use `footclient -N`. This may reduce the memory pressure of running many terminals.

This is similar to the `kitty --singleinstance` mentioned in another comment by amarshall.

Today I learned (thanks to this article) that I can use timg to display images right in my standard macOS terminal, even without switching to kitty or any other fancy thing. Not pixel perfect of course, but still, much faster to go through icons or other pictures than opening in a separate Preview window. A simple "brew install timg" worked for me. Will surely save me some clicks!

i've been using xst https://github.com/gnotclub/xst, a fork of suckless st https://st.suckless.org/ for a long period, but there's also st-flexipatch https://github.com/bakkeby/st-flexipatch available which now includes sixel support

edit: the article did mention st but claimed it had no scrollback, that's what the patches are for. st-flexipatch makes it easy to enable or disable the patches via c preprocessor defines.

Why not try Ghostty? https://ghostty.org

I've honestly never given terminal memory usage a second thought. Here is the memory usage of konsole version 26.04.1 on CachyOS.

     Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program
     53.3 MiB +  25.1 MiB =  78.5 MiB       konsole

     Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program
     61.9 MiB +  33.1 MiB =  95.0 MiB       konsole

[1] - https://github.com/pixelb/ps_mem

there is more to your choice of terminal emulators than pure memory usage.

https://lwn.net/Articles/749992/

https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/

Why is xfce4-terminal missing?

I'm using wezterm in KDE Plamas in Wayland.

I use to have a few terms active in the very early days of Linux. When I heard about screen/tmux now I just have 1 term open and multiple tmux sessions.

I think if you can get use to tmux/screen you may like that better :)