> What would you say is your favorite terminal

So far, ghostty. I do also like Alacritty and WezTerm, and think kitty is overhyped (and Warp is a privacy nightmare). A thing I really like about ghostty is it is incredibly easy to maintain. By far my smallest config file. Basically my theme and a few custom bindings. To be honest, there isn't a huge difference between all of them, with some being better at one thing than another, but I think ghostty gets things good all around.

Btw, vim bindings should already be available in your emulator, without the need for tmux. You can set bash to use them (set -o vi) but I suggest migrating to zsh if you like using the cli. I'll also give you one fun command most people don't know. While holding control, press x then e (if you are already using zsh you might need to add `zle -N edit-command-line` to your rc file but <C-x><C-e> needs no config in bash). I guess I should also mention that in vim you can open a terminal (:help term)

  > why as it relates to local development experience use? 

All these emulators can do, locally, everything tmux can do and more. You just have to remember that a session is the same thing as a window. All these emulators have tabs and splits. So there is no real advantage to tmux.

  > Are there features that these tools have that tmux lacks?

First off, switch because your emulator is probably more resource intensive. It may also be missing modern features like being able to view images (see sixel, chafa, or the kitty graphics protocol), ligatures, and a lot of other features.

Second, tmux lacks many of these modern features. Doing a passthrough can help but dealing with images is not a great experience. I have found no configuration where I can reliably view images and never have been able to produce images of the same quality. I always drop out of my session if I am entering a file browser like yazi or fzf (I'll use fzf but it limits the capabilities of previewing).