Looking for an alternative to the bloat of gnome-terminal? I was. I tend to use multiple terminals (I have 5 open right now) and I’m not a fan of tabbed terminals. I vaguely remembered using aterm once upon a time, so I fired it up. By default, aterm is quite ugly but uses much less resources than it’s GNOME counterpart.

Because aterm was built as an xterm replacement, it will honor Xresource settings for xterm, as well as it’s own Xresource settings. You can also customize it from the command line, which is what I did.

stone@moradin:~$ more ~/bin/aterm
/usr/bin/aterm -title ‘Terminal’ -bg black -shading 30 -fade 90 -fg #cecece -tr +sb -sr -si -sk

I’m pretty pleased with the results. I nice, clean terminal and considerably less memory usage. What more could a boy ask for?