xterm
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 16 of 40 terminal emulators by recommenders
Recommended for its accurate DEC VT terminal emulation, light memory use and low latency. The most common caveat is that it requires Xorg.
Recommended for its accurate DEC VT terminal emulation, light memory use and low latency. The most common caveat is that it requires Xorg.
26 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 19
- criticize it
- 7
- approval share
- 73%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 18 years
Median of the 3 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it carries the badge
- 19 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Light on memory and resources
“It's reasonably lightweight, runs and is packaged absolutely everywhere”
Comment from 19 Jul 2026 in “Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now” “I'm using 1GB with TWM, DIllo, TUI tools, XTerm, MuPDF and the like.”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “The RAM shortage comes for us all” “it's very small and works fine”
Comment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Damn Small Linux” Preferred over other terminals
“it's honestly the only usable terminal, none other has stuck with me”
Comment from 11 May 2026 in “Linux Terminal Memory Usage” “I'll happily keep using alacritty, konsole and xterm, thanks.”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “The terminal of the future” “larger displays and xterm felt like such a liberation”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display” Low latency and snappy startup
“Starting it with the wm keybinds is as snappy as opening a new Firefox tab.”
Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours” “it's got the lowest latency by quite a bit”
Comment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Ghostty – Terminal Emulator” Accurate DEC VT terminal emulation
“has to pass a suite of conformance tests that actually check its emulation of DEC VT series terminals”
Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “How to Choose Colors for Your CLI Applications” “just old vt340 support in XTerm”
Comment from 11 May 2026 in “Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Requires Xorg display system
“xterm shouldn't require Xorg. It should be agnostic to display system”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Devuan – Debian Without Systemd” “Want to run xterm? Requires Xorg.”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Devuan – Debian Without Systemd”
Other terminal emulators people recommend
The four most recommended other terminal emulators, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ghostty | 401 | 158 | 72% | 12 | 3 mo22 owners | Approved |
| Termux | 188 | 31 | 86% | 12 | 1 yr6 owners | Approved |
| iTerm2 | 95 | 69 | 58% | 12 | 10 yrs4 owners | — |
| Warp terminal | 84 | 86 | 49% | 11 | 1 yr5 owners | — |
| xtermThis page | 19 | 7 | 73% | 10 | 18 yrs3 owners | Approved |
What people said
25 of the 32 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the eye sore wasn't worth it for me”
“The code for xterm is discouraging”
“I do care about xterm and tmux.”
“If you start xterm five times on linux, you get five independent xterm processes.”
“Starting it with the wm keybinds is as snappy as opening a new Firefox tab.”
“It's reasonably lightweight, runs and is packaged absolutely everywhere”
“xterm supports it; most popular terminal emulators support it”
“it's honestly the only usable terminal, none other has stuck with me”
“just old vt340 support in XTerm”
“decent tools and a bare XTerm”
“I recently replaced xterm with Ghostty-web”
“larger displays and xterm felt like such a liberation”
“xterm in X11 has this feeling”
“It was a weird sensation (but good)”
“it's got the lowest latency by quite a bit”
“The concept of an XTerm it's far inferior to Emacs”
“has to pass a suite of conformance tests that actually check its emulation of DEC VT series terminals”
“xterm shouldn't require Xorg. It should be agnostic to display system”
“Want to run xterm? Requires Xorg.”
“the visual glitch doesn't crash anything”
“I need a reliable terminal that handles whatever those devices throw at it”
“it's very small and works fine”
“I'm using 1GB with TWM, DIllo, TUI tools, XTerm, MuPDF and the like.”
“I'll happily keep using alacritty, konsole and xterm, thanks.”
“It does it fine with GNU Unifont and raw XTerm and others.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.