To me, the most relevant aspect is the time it takes to open. I can't believe how slow the startup time in common linux distributions is by default, it's so annoying, by the time it opens I already forgot what I wanted to do. Alacritty has this cool feature where you only ever have to "open" a single terminal, whereas new windows can be created very efficiently with `alacritty msg create-window`, being forks of the initial window. It makes using my pc a lot more comfortable.

Foot is instant. Ghostty takes ages. I don’t know why there’s such a difference, but I can’t use anything slower than Foot now without getting annoyed.

this is is not new. we have had factory model (forking the initial window) in terminal emulator since 1990s.

Also present in urxvt and kitty.

I'm using OpenBSD with xterm, and when I use something like `time xterm -e 'sh -c "echo 1; exit"'`, it says 360ms or something. Starting it with the wm keybinds is as snappy as opening a new Firefox tab. foot and st felt as fast when I was using them.

Yep, I want really fast startup too. Of the two I use:

xfce4-terminal starts utterly instantly without single instance feature.

Kitty has the single instance feature and starts instantly with it.