Comment by spacedcowboy

My machine has more memory than I generally know what to do with. The mapped-into-memory footprint of Terminal.app right now is ~112MB, for 12 terminal tabs across 4 windows.

In other words, I don't care about the memory use.

I think I commented earlier that there's not that much I use the terminal for during development - mainly git. Keeping a terminal open, mainly hidden, in the bottom-left corner with the tab set to the top-level directory isn't really a burden.