I do most of my work in a terminal emulator and I mostly want the terminal I use to be fast to run and start. I have tried other terminal emulators as well (kitty, for example) since they promise to be GPU-accelerated which sounded relevant to my needs.

I always end up back at "st" though. It is fast enough for my purposes and does just about exactly what I want and not more. Reading about Ghostty 1.4's D-bus activated window creation I was wondering about the actual measurements of the improvements given the added complexity

A footnote mentions that the creation time of a new emulator window goes from about 200ms to 20ms. That made me wonder why the regular startup time is so slow ...

Turns out that at least on my setup ("st" on X11) you can get quite close even without the added complexity.

  $ time st -e 'exit'

  real    0m0.021s
  user    0m0.011s
  sys     0m0.005s