[$] A look at terminal emulators, part 1

Terminals have a special place in computing history, surviving alongwith the command line in the face of the rising ubiquity of graphicalinterfaces. Terminal emulators have replacedhardwareterminals, which themselves were upgrades from punched cards and toggle-switch inputs. Modern distributions now ship with asurprising variety of terminal emulators. While some people may behappy with the default terminal provided by their desktop environment,others take great pride at using exotic software for running theirfavorite shell or text editor. But as we'll see in this two-part series,not all terminals are created equal: they vary wildly in terms of functionality, size, andperformance.