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I am getting annoyed at the lack of good xterms on Linux. Gnome-terminal is very slow, it's not smart enough to skip ahead, just keeps doing the screen updates. I've been using PowerShell lately, but it's kinda krusty. What I want is an xterm I can hack, written in Python.

Shouldn't be too hard. Build it on GTK or whatever. The hardest bit is translating escape codes into screen updates.

Some things I'd like to see, of varying plausibility:

• Display keeps up. Pine is unusable on gnome-terminal, it's pathetic. I want responsiveness!

• Anti-aliasing. It's nice.

• Adjustable padding. Make character cells a few pixels higher or wider if the font isn't sensible about it. Do something cute with non-monospaced fonts, let cells bulge or something.

• Smart color choice. I want to be able to choose a foreground and a background, and have it adjust the other colors so that they have sufficient contrast against the two. If the foreground and background in a cell clash, damnit, adjust one of them and to hell with consistency of palette.

• English syntax highlighting. Give the vowels a different value. Give "of", "the", "a", etc a different color.

• Fisheye around the line the cursor/mouse is on.

Any takers?

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