I've been using xfce4-terminal on XFCE4 a lot and need something more customizable. The highest priority at the moment is to have the ability to get notificiations of new activity only when the terminal window is in the background. I'd prefer an emulator without a lot of dependencies when used with XFCE4. Is there a good terminal emulator like that?

I like Alacritty and, to a lesser extent, kitty.

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I like tilda. I'm not sure how you would get notifications while it's hidden, though. It's a drop-down/popup terminal that I use all the time. AFAIK there are no dependencies.

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Thanks. Those were both interesting, especially Alacritty. It might have a lot of potential. However, at the moment it looks like a time sink due to the complexity of the configuration and how almost every change breaks something else. In particular, I need something where backspace and delete both work, out of the box, even when running an SSH client within the terminal. Same for arrow keys, etc.

My uses are like this:

terminal -> ssh -> tmux

or

terminal -> tmux -> ssh

My goal is for the bell produced at the far right of the chain to be noticable visually or auditorially at the far left.

I haven't used tmux in forever, maybe have a look at tilix - looks like its notifications might satisfy. No experience myself with non-visible notifications.

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Thanks. Tilix is also interesting. I notice that it lacks the ability to set custom icons. That means that with many instances running at the same time, there is no way to tell them apart when using alt-tab to switch between open programs. I'd switch to it for other things if it weren't for that missing feature.

It's looking a lot like this is not a simple task. I've ignored audio alerts and bells for a Very Long Time and took their absence as a feature until now that I need it.

One option may be to use hooks in tmux to trigger on 'alert-bell' or 'alert-activity'. Those can be used to fire up scripts. However, that is a bit fiddly as an alert won't be triggered if a tmux window is active even if the terminal which it is in is in the background.