I have no idea about sakura, but being a libvte-based terminal, I highly doubt it's comparable (or even approaches) xterm in term of rendering speed.
I'm wondering how people can compare these terminals mentioning speed, considering the actual performance is bound by libvte, and thus will be equally the same between roxterm, sakura, tilda, etc. What are they measuring?
xterm is quite fast (in the order of 3-5x faster) than any libvte-based terminal. Try doing something like "time [term] -c 'cat <bigfile>'", and try varying the scrollback size to have a real measure.
[u]rxvt in turn is even faster, especially with large scrollback buffers, which is the main (I could say only, really) reason I use it. As in, 10x faster than any libvte based terminal.
I also use suckless tools (with spectrwm), though I never had a reason to investigate st. urxvt supports fallback fonts, which for UTF-8 text is essential.
> I'm wondering how people can compare these terminals mentioning speed, considering the actual performance is bound by libvte, and thus will be equally the same between roxterm, sakura, tilda, etc. What are they measuring?
Not sure about others, but the first thing I test: dmesg; ps auxww; ls /dev
I only really care about apparent speed and, like I said, sakura was the only one that was comparable to xterm.
None of the other terminals I have tried (and only now I realize that they have libvte in common, thanks for that) have managed to perform acceptably (for me, at least).
On my windoze box now, so can't check - but I think there should be something about colors in the right-click context menu? But I'm not entirely sure when (as in which version) palette/colorset support[1] was added -- it might not yet be in Debian stable?
I do have one question though, why are the colors more pale in sakura than in xterm?
And is there any way to change it?