I'm baffled by the repeated insistence that alacritty and kitty are fast (never tried wexterm). There's noticeable lag spawning either on my reasonably new and fast laptop, which xterm just doesn't have.
When I need a terminal, mod+enter spawn one and close it. I'll often do this to download a file, start yt-dlp, mpv etc. The session is all tmux so I never keep the window around when not in use.
Me too. On my systems, running Debian with dwm, a Kitty terminal appears instantly. It’s the fastest terminal I’ve ever used, by a big margin, including xterm. The fact that I can do things such as ssh into a remote machine and see an image in that machine’s filesystem displayed in the terminal are bonuses. I mainly use it because of its speed and Unicode support.
Sure, if that's your workflow then I get it. I and many others keep around several persistent windows or tabs however. I don't care if Alacritty takes 1s to start.
Still doesn't invalidate its usefulness, too. Alacritty in particular is often times a better Unicode-rendering citizen compared to other terminals.
When saying "fast" I definitely meant it as "all the operations it does while alive" and not "how many times per minute I can restart it" (lol).