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I think it's a bit overkill to use a full Chromium runtime to display a black window with monospace text.

It's multiple things I dislike about modern development conveniently packaged together.

If you're on macOS, you can fairly happily get by with the default terminal (it's also super fast). Otherwise I would use iTerm2, alacritty, or kitty—all of which I've used individually for 6+ months straight at a time.

its cool and has eye candy but its incredibly slow, moreso over time. I went from iterm to hyper but ended up just going back to mac's own terminal app since i do very basic stuff in the terminal and dont need any bells and whistles.

It's ultra slow compared to any other decent alternative

Not really, at least in comparison with iTerm 2. Hyper recently introduced a WebGL renderer and with my oh-my-zsh/pure-prompt config, both of them loaded in about the same time.

But keep in mind, the only reason I use Hyper is because of the borderless window aesthetic.