I work on a laptop with a small scren most of the time. I am constantly going in and out of the shell. iTerm2 has a quake mode that allows me to seamlessly pull this up on top with a keypress. It significantly reduces the lag of switching to another window with CMD+Tab or w/e.
Some of this stems from just the extremely bad support for hotkey window management on the part of MacOS.
On my Linux machine with KDE I can open a new terminal with a single hotkey and alternate between open terminals with a second hotkey. I've never once wished for a fancier terminal than KDE's default.
Using Mac for work is a different story, though it's remedied somewhat with Rectangle and similar.
The small screen is your productivity bottleneck far more than the terminal itself. Change that and I’m sure you’ll notice a much larger productivity boost than a few seconds saved on cmd-tab or other hotkeys available (and there are hotkey improvement tools you can install that aren’t tied to a specific application).
I move around a lot and travel light, upgrading the small screen isn't really an option. I definitely agree there are probably countless ways I could further optimize my system, but switching to a more feature-rich shell app is a clear productivity upgrade, since it only took me a few minutes to setup the features I need (security concerns aside).
