Finding the right settings is a relatively slow process. Also, finding the right values for 80% of the settings is fast, but fiddling with the rest can take time. Trying something new also becomes harder.
For the vast majority of user-facing programs, run-time configuration is a must. A fancy GUI for it might be superfluous; a simple text file / command-line way to set options should always be available.
This sort of rules out binary distributions, or changing settings on a remote machine where you don't have the build dependencies installed. The latter may be irrelevant for a terminal emulator, but not for the general case.
In my experience if one can edit config files on a system, one has room to install a minimal C compiler. And one can distribute things in a binary form even if the config requires compilation. Consider distributing an application as a library or object files when the target machine needs to compile and link only the config file.
The difference between a config file that's dynamically loaded and a file that is compiled in is surprisingly small, as long as the compile times are very fast. First noticed that when using XMonad: one shortcut to recompile it and reload it, that's just as fast as editing configuration of any other window manager.
If it's one thing I've often had to change across systems (hardware and operating systems) it's things like font type and size. If one works mostly from one workstation (eg: a laptop) this is less of a hassle (just need to change on each new generation of ppi, and perhaps on some major system upgrades) -- but then one might want to switch things up as new fonts are released every so often.
Edit-compile-run is a rather complicated way to tune font size compared to a slider.
And on that note, while I admire ST for its simplicity, I've been a happy user of Sakura for the past few years (though, sadly not on windows 10... I've yet to find a really good console for w10).
For windows ten I'm using a combination of babun/WSL and cmder. But I agree that there is no good terminal emulator. It's not terribly surprising though. When those aren't enough I have a "seamless" ubuntu VM running.
I think it's somewhat surprising that they got the Linux subsystem for Linux working well, but apparently didn't spend much time on making a proper terminal experience.
Don't get me wrong powershell/the standard terminal is miles ahead of the old crappy cmd.com - but bundling a solid terminal would've gone a long way to pacify my desire to dual boot Linux (read:stop using w10) on my Surface pro.
If I weren't teaching students that run w10 on their own pcs, I would probably have relegated w10 to a vm/wine under Linux.
I use st in i3 under Cygwin on Windows 8.1. If Cygwin works in Windows 10, that (or any other Linux terminal manager of your choice) should be doable there too.
Well, the promise of the Linux subsystem is kind of to not having to run half-ports like cygwin in the first place... Still, appreciate the tip. Any idea how well that works on a high-resolution display like the surface 4?
