I open and close terminals _constantly_, but I'm usually pretty weird in my workflow, so no comment on your first question.

I run a scrolling WM and have settled into a habit of opening terminals when I need them, then closing them right after. I'll open a terminal, git pull, close it. Etc. I also use a terminal that launches cold in 10-20 ms, so it's not like a pay a price for it.

This is actually what I thought this post was about! But then I saw the Ghostty reference, which, in my experience, is not very fast to launch at all. I got it opening new windows quickly by running the main process as a systemd service, but Foot launches way faster without all that fuss, and allows you to go the daemon route if you want it _even_ faster.

EDIT: Just want to clarify, no shade on Ghostty. That project is cross platform and uses the 100% defensible decision to use the full GTK stack on linux. Foot is Linux AND Wayland only, and uses that very restrictive environment to optimize the hell out of startup and general performance.

It can affect shell subprocess startup time as well, which, depending on your setup and the tools you use, might be worth optimising for.

I don't remember when I did it, but it looks like I must have gone through this at some point (maybe due to using GNU Make a lot? Or perhaps it was some other tool) - my zsh setup does a bunch of autocomplete setup only in the interactive case, and it seems to help a bit with startup time, at least on macOS:

    % for i in {1..5}; do /usr/bin/time zsh -i -c exit; done # zsh in interactive mode
            0.05 real         0.03 user         0.02 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.01 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.00 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.00 sys
            0.02 real         0.01 user         0.00 sys
    % for i in {1..5}; do /usr/bin/time zsh -c exit; done # zsh in non-interactive mode
            0.01 real         0.00 user         0.01 sys
            0.01 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
            0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
            0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
            0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys

I'd say your workflow is pretty typical, from what I am seeing.

Developers that are very heavily invested in terminal and (over) optimize their terminal configuration are a small but very vocal minority.

I only notice how efficient my terminal is if something dumps a ton of logs to stdout. Sure I can pipe to a file and use vim, but it's convenient not to need to do that. And sometimes I have like 8 things going at once.

I do the same, so there's a good chance you're (we're) the weird one