urxvt

In my search for a more efficient environment I couldn't not have a look at alternative terminal emulators. I currently use xterm, but being quite happy with it I can't say there are no features I dream about. rxvt-unicode, compiled with support for all encodings, has a larger footprint (almost twice the resident size of xterm, but I haven't done any tuning) - but it does a great job displaying all those exotic unicode characters. Moreover, it has a daemon mode, the thing I always wanted. Now that I plan switching to a 2 or 4 terminals in total, it's not as critical as it used to be. I sure wish zsh and many other highly parallel tools had a daemon mode.

Thanks to Thierry Thomas, rxvt-unicode port is in wonderful condition: no dialog-style options, but fully customizable and up-to-date. I'll give it a shot.