I use xterm because it's one of the only terminal emulators that allows me to disable the alt-screen (titeInhibit). Apparently I'm one of the few, but when I vi/view a file and exit, or read a man page and go back to the command line, I still want to be able to reference what I was just looking at.

Absolutely! I often use cat in tmux instead of less because of this. Will try xterm now, too.

In addition to the sibling comment, tmux has the per-pane option 'alternate-screen'. You can set its default with 'set-option -g alternate-screen off'

You can use the -X option to less to avoid it clearing the screen. To set this option by default, put "export LESS=-X" on your profile.

If you want the same sane behavior for vim, add "set t_ti= t_te=" to your .vimrc.

Indeed, but it's more painful to get these things set across all the systems and accounts I use, even given Ansible. Doable, but titeInhibit is kind of nice. :-)

With Kitty, which I've been playing with and doesn't support titeInhibit, it requires deploying a termcap package everywhere, which is also painful, but I ended up building a version with those escape codes removed, which was kind of a benefit of having to use and deploy a custom termcap.

Note that you can also globally disable the alternate screen in xterm, as explained elsewhere on this thread.

> Many GNOME-ish terminals use vte which drops frames if it can't keep up rendering.

Cannot you that with Xterm too?

XTerm*fastScroll: true

> To the best of my knowledge, one downside is the text rendering is synchronous.

I find this to be a feature, it's part of what makes xterm a terminal emulator.

There's a speedhack in recent xterm that makes it behave more like libvte, but I forgot the incantation to enable it.