I couldn’t find a terminal emulator that suited me - gnome-terminal is too bloated, it depends on a stack on Gnome libraries; xterm appears to eat meta keys, making using IRSSI or anything that needs Alt key combinations a little awkward, and XFCE-Terminal is not only uninstallable in Debian, it doesn’t compile even with some major hacking around, since the last update was over a year ago.

So, I bashed out a basic terminal using PyGTK and VTE. It more-or-less seems to work, despite having taken less than half an hour. It’s not at all configurable, unless you want to edit the source. But it works.