Probably a different audience. 
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The āxtermā users are likely to be people who use a lot of CLI (command line interface), while the youtube watchers are more likely to be people who emphasize the GUI (graphic user interface).
āNobodyā is different than āNobody I observeā.
Itās easy to conflate those two and make a bad assumption. 
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It is true, I donāt know a lot of people that use Linux , I mistakenly considered what I can see on social media as significant.
Iāve begun to realize that there are varying levels of Linux users: those who talk on social media like YouTube, who arenāt the majority, and those who actually use it at work, system administrators and programmers. The second category is the most powerful, but itās difficult to know how they use Linux because theyāre reserved and donāt talk about it. Theyāre difficult to meet, except occasionally on blogs or forums.
I really enjoy spying on them, looking at their GitHub pages to learn from them.
Modern terminal emulator windows have much better scroll bars (not the ancient ones dating back to the early 1990s Athena widgets like XTerm), multiple tabs, you can customize font, background color and text color in a nice UI and not only via X resources, and the defaults are reasonably usable, to mention just some features.
Iāve been using X11 since about 1991, and XTerm was the only game in town back then. But thatās history. I really donāt care about a little more RAM consumption, especially not with all those other processes in the background eating up RAM like there is no tommorrow, yet I donāt even know what two thirds of them do and why I would want them running in the first place (and I am a system level Linux developer).
I care about that just as little as I care about my carās steering wheel not being made of carbon fiber which could save maybe 100 g; when all the rest of the car weighs 1.3 t. Who cares.
XTerm is still useful as a last ditch resort when everything else stopped working. But even XTerm needs some basic pre-configuration in the X resources to make its font large enough to be readable on a modern screen resolution; the default font size is too tiny to be usable (let alone being a horrible pixelated font), and not even that small detail ever gets enough love to be fixed.
It had its days but they were in the last millenium. Itās the older sister of the modern terminal emulators; the one that was ugly even back then, and now itās become the ugly old spinster.
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I donāt think so. Xterm has stood the test of time and its longevity and historical value are rather arguments for using it than for not using it, to me.
I do not care much about configurability by GUI as long as it can be done simply by editing some text file, and I do not need tabs in a terminal emulator when I have tmux (my window manager is capable of tabs, too).
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The things you dislike about āxtermā are what I actually like. Iām happy with the fonts, although I do use Xresources to give me a smaller font than the default. I like that there is no menu bar.
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The fonts are actually a MAJOR bug: They are so tiny (let alone ugly) that you canāt read them on any halfway modern display. They are not only an insult to the user, they are borderline discriminating against anybody beyond 40 years, especially with a modern full HD (1920 x 1080) laptop.
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On the other hand, there is not much which keeps you from adding *XTerm*faceSize: 10 to ~/.Xdefaults, and with *XTerm*faceName: DejaVuSansMono there is truetype.
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Which is a kind of antique and uncomfortable way to do it. Modern terminals allow such things on the fly via the menu and keyboard shortcuts. Every modern terminal outperforms Xterm in nearly every way, settings and capability wise (without the need to modify a inflexible setting file).
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The difference of turning a GUI knob āFontsizeā to 10, writing ā10ā in a GUI text input field, or writing āfontsize: 10ā in a configuration file is relatively minor IMO.
If there are hundreds of different settings, a well-structured dotfile may be even more transparent and easier to navigate in than a GUI. Dotfiles are easy to copy and distribute, can be extended (echo fontsize: 10 >> .dotfile) or modified (sed -i 's/fontsize\:\ 10/fontsize\:\ 11/' .dotfile) even programmatically.
On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with having a GUI to a configuration file. Why not, if it is advantageous in some use cases.
Sure; thatās what I do. But you have to think ahead; you need to do that before you really need XTerm, before an emergency.
sh@balrog:~> xrdb -query | grep -i xterm
XTerm*saveLines: 500
XTerm*borderWidth: 4
XTerm*scrollBar: on
XTerm*background: white
XTerm*foreground: black
XTerm*cursorColor: red
XTerm*pointerColor: sea green
XTerm*vt100*geometry: 80x40
XTerm*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono
XTerm*faceSize: 9.5
Iām merely 86 years old, with a 1920x1080 display. The āxtermā fonts are very readable for me. Iāll admit that my wife has trouble with them. Iām using:
xterm*font:6x13
in my ā.Xresourcesā file.
We are all different. Itās good to have choices.
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Iām close enough to blind @74 without trying to use a laptop with 1920x1080. I use DPI 120, āxterm*faceSize: 11ā with 24" 1920x1200 about 90cm away when not leaning forward, but spend at least 1,000% more time in 5 tab 132x43 Konsole windows than Xterm.
Actually, in such a situation I would Ctrl-Alt-F1.
Anyway, that two of xtermās defaults do not fit your needs and you perceive a lack of tabs management capability (Iāve never missed tabs in a terminal emulator since there is tmux, screen, and window manager capable of tabs), and that there are newer alternatives, does not make xterm an obsolete, or last-resort, software, IMO.
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There are several disadvantages of xterm:
- requires many configurations to behave as āneededā, things like Alt key, Backspace, scrolling, and a lot of small things which usually just work in other terminals out of the box. xterm instead keep some legacy behavior which is not that useful anymore. You can check the xterm page in the arch wiki about the things to be tuned
- font rendering is not perfect, even though itās usually not objective and hard to judge
- it has graphical user interface (at least menu and scroll bar) and they look slightly old, I am find with menu because I usually donāt need it but scrollbars looks odd to me and the position (at the left) looks also strange nowadays, I am not sure whether this can be configured but Iād prefer such obvious things to just work
xterm and xosview are two traditional X apps Iāve been using since I learned Digital Unix on DEC Alpha workstations back in 1994. (It was also where I used Mosaic and Netscape first, but thatās another story.)
I have 61 lines in my .Xdefaults file for xterm and 13 for xosview. Example:
XTerm*VT100*translations: #override \n\
Alt <Key>X: fullscreen(toggle) \n\
Alt <Key>Y: set-reverse-video(toggle) \n\
Ctrl <Key> minus: smaller-vt-font() \n\
Ctrl <Key> plus : larger-vt-font() \n\
Ctrl <Key> 0: set-vt-font(d)
This one line (broken up into six) assigns key combinations for fullscreen, inverse colors, bigger, smaller and standard font size. There is beauty in this resource-oriented style of customization.
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Having scrollbars at the left side is even more rational than scrollbars at the right side when reading text left-to-right, I think. Because it is the line beginnings more than the endings that I read in order to know how far to scroll. I wish more applications displaying text in windows had scrollbars at the left side.
Yes, there is. Elegance equals simplicity times generality
Re: scrollbars ā Using shift+PgUp, shift+PgDn and the scrollwheel (even touchpad gestures), I donāt even have any scrollbar displayed in xterm:
XTerm*scrollBar: false
However, I really like to have a generous scrollback buffer:
XTerm*saveLines: 8192
(I also really like to use the Ā»traditionalĀ« middle-mouseclick X clipboard independent from KDE-Plasmaās Ā»mainstreamĀ« Ctrl-X/-C/-V clipboard. If I need to transfer snippets between both, I find myself using the Firefox address bar or Kate. But thatās just me enjoying my options.)
I am somewhat afraid of the post-X11 era when I recall some other major progressions of the past like LILO ā grub, MBR ā UEFI, init ā systemd, flat design, small scrollbars.