xterm vs gnome-terminal

[linduxed]

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I've been installing some vim plugins lately, and I've noticed that whenever I try to do Control+Foo or Alt+Bar I never get it to work.
According to some users in #vim on FreeNode this has to do with how vim handles input, but one of them mentioned something about xterm working better than my current terminal emulator, gnome-terminal.

So I fired up xterm, and indeed the plugins that previously didn't work due to their keybindings being stuff like Alt+1 started working.

The main reasons for which I currently choose gnome-terminal over xterm are font smoothing, zooming in/out and terminal transparency.


My questions are the following:
Why does xterm manage to understand mentioned commands but not gnome-terminal?
Are there other terminals that work as well as xterm in this respect?
If so, is there any terminal that does the three things I like in gnome-terminal?

[rcgreen]

Your window should have some menus. You can configure
whether the window intercepts certain keystrokes, or passes
them on to the program running inside the window.

[reed9]

The main reasons for which I currently choose gnome-terminal over xterm are font smoothing, zooming in/out and terminal transparency.

I'm not sure about zooming, but it's easy enough to set up Xterm or other similar terminal emulator with nice looking fonts and transparency.

The magic all happens in your ~/.Xdefaults file. For example, I use urxvt and have it configured thusly:

URxvt.font:       xft:Liberation Mono:pixelsize=14:antialias=true:hinting=true
URxvt.boldFont:   xft:Liberation Mono:bold:pixelsize=14:antialias=true:hinting=true
URxvt.scrollBar: false
URxvt.perl-ext-common:  default,matcher,clipboard
URxvt.urlLauncher:      /usr/bin/chromium-browser
URxvt.matcher.button:   1
#URxvt*loginShell:true
URxvt*transparent:false
URxvt*shading:40
URxvt*background:Black
URxvt*foreground:Green
URxvt*saveLines:32767

How to make urxvt look like gnome-terminal « SaltyCrane Blog

[linduxed]

Your window should have some menus. You can configure
whether the window intercepts certain keystrokes, or passes
them on to the program running inside the window.

There is no option like this in gnome-terminal, if that's what you meant.

As for reed9's post:

I really like your urxvt config, however for some reason urxvt shares the keycombo problem that gnome-terminal has, which leaves me with no reason to switch.

Additionally I would tweak the colours a bit in that config, but that's just a matter of taste.

[linduxed]

Honestly, the most important thing for me right now is to figure out why the keycombos work for some terminals (at the moment only xterm confirmed), but not for others.

Since it has been proven that the transparency and fonts can be fixed easily (zooming isn't all that important), I want to know what makes these terminals unable to do whatever it it that xterm does.