The Terminal and xterm Compared (Mac OS X for Unix Geeks)

1.2. The Terminal and xterm Compared

There are several important differences between Mac OS X's Terminal application and the xterm common to Unix systems running X Windows:

You cannot customize the characteristics of the Terminal with command-line switches such as -fn, -fg, and -bg. Instead, you must use the Terminal's Show Info dialog.
Unlike xterm, in which each window corresponds to a separate process, a single master process controls the Terminal. However, each shell session is run as a separate child process of the Terminal.
The Terminal selection is not automatically put into the clipboard. Use -C to copy, -V to paste. Even before you press -C, the current text selection is contained in a selection called the pasteboard. The operations described in Section 1.4, later in this chapter, use the pasteboard.
The value of $TERM is vt100 when running under Terminal (it's set to xterm under xterm by default).
Pressing PageUp or PageDown scrolls the Terminal window, rather than letting the running program handle it.
On compatible systems (generally, a system with an ATI Radeon or NVidia GeForce AGP graphics adapter), the Mac OS X Terminal (and all of the Aqua user interface) will use Quartz Extreme acceleration to make everything faster and smoother.

If you need an xterm, you can have it; however, you will have to install a compatible version of the X Window System first. See Chapter 9 for more information about the X Window System.