About that xiate story yesterday.

  Writing  xiate  might  not  have  been  the worst thing after all. For
  starters, I couldn't find an actual alternative. The closest thing  to
  xiate would be taterm[1], I guess.  If I'm not mistaken, it lacks some
  important features, though, such as launching programs other than your
  shell, e.g. "taterm -e vim".

  That  client-server  model  is not that bad, either. I was curious and
  removed it. Yes, without UIM installed, it launches fast  enough.  But
  the  memory footprint is massive. Open a bunch of terminals and memory
  usage easily goes up by a few hundred megabytes. That's reason  enough
  for me to keep that mode (taterm has it, too).

  There's  a  bunch  of  VTE  terminals, but they are all either big and
  clunky or hard to configure. Or they are unmaintained.

  ____________________

  1. https://github.com/t-8ch/taterm/