alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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+1 for Foot, truly a joy to use.
I constantly open and close terminals too. Maybe I'm doing a quick lazygit check on cwd. Maybe I'm opening up an ephemeral claude/codex session for a couple questions about why a test failed. Or quickly editing a file with vim. Or remembering where I put that file with yazi or fzf. -- I don't even know, but all of it is contingent on it being fast to open a new terminal in cwd.
So much so that I vibe-coded my own terminal emulator for vertical tabs on macOS (using libghostty for the terminals) that is faster and less weird than iTerm.