Meanwhile I have to wonder what's the selling point of these over good old urxvt? It has an ecosystem of perl plugins, which has all the batteries I need and more. In its daemon/client mode I can have 20+ terminal windows open and they consume sum total of like 30MB memory, with embedded perl interpreter and everything. I feel like one or two instances of these modern incarnations is enough to completely dwarf that number.
GPU rendering is really cool, but I don't really understand what might people be doing where CPU rendering in terminal is anywhere close to being a bottleneck. People lose ability to comprehend way before that, why would I want gibberish to be printed even faster? Redirecting output to a file (or /dev/null) is almost always what I would want?
Well, if you search for these projects yourself and read the first few paragraphs on their websites, you might learn the selling points. Warp has a lot of features that are just not possible in urxvt.
Having seen them, there are two things I have to say:
1. I wouldn't say there really is much that would be "just not possible" in urxvt. If you drop down to Perl level, you can do almost everything (albeit you would have to write Perl).
2. The reason urxvt doesn't have majority of those selling points is because they arguably aren't the concern of terminal emulator at all. Things like better autocomplete menu, command editing, history browsing etc. historically fell under purview of the shell. You can have all these things with say zsh and a few chose plugins.
GPU rendering is really cool, but I don't really understand what might people be doing where CPU rendering in terminal is anywhere close to being a bottleneck. People lose ability to comprehend way before that, why would I want gibberish to be printed even faster? Redirecting output to a file (or /dev/null) is almost always what I would want?