You should be using Xterm

Back in the day, before about 1995, if you wanted to use a terminal emulator, you used xterm

That was 30 years ago. Because you use Linux as I recommend, I strongly encourage you to use xterm today. It’s still the best terminal emulator.

The commercial X11 terminal emulators, hpterm, DECterm, whatever hot mess IBM made, were all ugly as sin, and didn’t work right. They were bloated, and incredibly, missed useful features that xterm had. What features they had over and above xterm were misfeatures.

xterm is lightweight, fast, and still supported in 2026. As of this writing, the latest patch is #410, dated 2026/05/01. xterm does a decent job of UTF-8 support. The scroll bar is unique and useful.

Features that are invaluable

The Best Cut-n-Paste, bar none

Although modern laptop track pads are doing their best to make it impossible, xterm and X11 have the best cut-n-paste. Left-mouse-click to select (or drag-select), right-mouse-click to extend, middle-mouse-click to paste.

Clearly, Apple and the MacOS people are wrong about having a one-button-mouse, they’re forever using control-click or shift-click or command-click, or keyboard Vulcan Death Grips to copy-n-paste.

If you plug a USB 3-button mouse into a modern Mac, you get a lot of the X mouse behavior. The iTerm2 terminal emulator for MacOS actually does the left highlight/right extends/middle pastes behavior between iTerm2 windows.

Focus is “the window”

Specifically, focus for an xterm is the single place where xterm allows you to type. You don’t have to be a pixel-perfect mouse athlete to paste at the right place in vim, or n the command line. You just have to get the mouse pointer into the window.

This is vastly under-rated ergonomically. If you use a tiling window manager like i3wm, you can change focus with alt-H, alt-J, alt-K, alt-L, then paste in the xterm you just changed focus to. You don’t have to put the mouse pointer at the exact pixel you want to paste the text.

You can set xterm to do pasting via keyboard keys, too, which is also ergonomically wonderful. No time spent moving hand to mouse, then clicking, then moving hand back to keyboard. If xterm did the usual WYSIWYG paste-where-the-mouse-pointer is, you’d also have to move your hand around to acquire the correct mouse pointer location.

Using the vim text editor in an xterm becomes a good deal more efficient if you have X11 paste mapped to a keyboard key, and take advantage of the single focus point. Traditional shell command line interpreters also gain from this combination, and from setting xterm to include ‘/’, ‘*’ and a few other characters in the “words” that it highlights (and implicitly copies).

Weird but efficient scroll bar

running xterm illustrating its unusual scroll bar

Putting the scroll bar on the left is an odd choice, but one made in the mists of the past, apparently in 1984.

Left-mouse-click anywhere in the scroll bar zone jumps forward one screenful. Right-mouse-click anywhere in the scroll bar jumps backward one screenful. You can page forward and back with single mouse clicks, dispensing with the cognitive demands of holding a mouse button down and dragging the mouse around. Windows puts a further demand: keep the mouse pointer withing the scroll bar zone. You have to maintain coordination to scroll in Windows. The xterm behavior might seem odd, but it burdens you less.

Middle-mouse-click puts the “thumb”, the scroll bar slider where you middle-clicked.

X resources that enable these features

Here are the .Xresources entries I use for xterm.

 1	XTerm*VT100.scrollBar: true
 2	XTerm*VT100.saveLines: 9000
 3	XTerm*VT100.cutNewLine: false
 4	XTerm*VT100.cutToBeginningOfLine: false
 5	XTerm*VT100.charClass: 33:48,35:48,37:48,42:48,45-47:48,64:48,95:48,126:48
 6	XTerm*VT100*translations: #override \n\
 7	    <Key>F2: insert-selection(PRIMARY) \n\
 8	    <Key>F3: insert-selection(CLIPBOARD) \n\
 9	    <Key>F4: insert-selection(SECONDARY) \n\
10	    Shift Ctrl <Btn2Down>: popup-menu(vtMenu) \n\
11	    Ctrl ~Meta ~Shift <Key>BackSpace: popup-menu(vtMenu)
12	scrollstyle: plain
13	XTerm*utf8: 1
14	XTerm*loginShell: true
15	XTerm*cursorColor: orange
16	XTerm*pointerColor: red
17	XTerm*pointerColorBackground: red
18	XTerm*pointerShape: left_ptr
19	XTerm*cursorTheme: Adwaita
20	XTerm*faceName: Mono
21	XTerm*faceSize: 18
22	! Large cursor for 4K screen Dell E7470
23	Xcursor.size: 64
  • Line 1: xterm doesn’t show a scroll bar by default.
  • Line 2: 9000 lines of scroll back. Trust me, you’ll need it.
  • Lines 3, 4: triple clicking on some word will highlight (and immediately copy) from that word to the end of the line, but not to the beginning of the line, and won’t include a newline in the copied text. This is more useful than I ever thought.
  • Line 5: Asterisks, slashes, dashes periods and a few other characters are part of words, not just numbers and letters. That way double clicking on most file names highlights (and immediately copies) the whole file name. A word doesn’t include single and double quotes or colons and semicolons.
  • Lines 6-9: Very important. F2 function key pastes the X11 primary selection, F3 key pastes the clipboard selection, and F4 pastes the secondary selection. These are all different for some reason. If you highlight some text in an xterm, that text ends up in the primary selection. If you highlight text in Firefox and control-C, that text ends up in the clipboard selection. The middle mouse button usually pastes the primary selection, but I’ll bet some distros use clipboard just to spite us all. Anyway, these 3 keys let you paste from the keyboard.

Every other resource is nice to have (UTF-8 support), but the real must haves are basically lines 1 through 8. Setting the cutting, character classes and keyboard pasting can change the way you edit text. You don’t have to move your hand to the mouse.