It’s a long time since I came across rxvt-unicode.
About seven years ago, when I switched from Windows XP to Ubuntu mainly for performance issues, I never be bored with searching for everything with a higher speed. To me, gnome-terminal is too much slow as a terminal being frequently opened and closed. Then, rxvt-unicode came through.
At first glance, rxvt-unicode was so ugly that I put it behind without the slightest bit of hesitation. Not until I once saw a screenshot did I realize this ugly thing can actually be pretty like that. So I started to take it as my primary terminal since then, for it was the fastest terminal I can find at that time.
Time flies, rxvt-unicode has proved to be a very good friend within these years, only until yesterday. I descided to change my Zsh theme to agnoster, which is a very pretty and git-friendly theme. Although I did everything according to the official manual, the right and left arrow signs were still displayed as boxes, then I tried almost all the methods I could find from Google, it still didn’t work.
So I reluctantly descided to part from rxvt-unicode. A number of terminals came out through these years, some of them also show a good performance, like sakura, terminator, etc. Now I take sakura as my primary terminal, it runs as fast as rxvt-unicode while working normally with agnoster or powerline.
Here is the final effect:
Update (2013-07-07 23:34:53):
Thanks to Star Brilliant, he mentioned LilyTerm in his comment. I discovered that it is even faster than Sakura while supplying plenty of functions, so now I descide to switch to LilyTerm.