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Add to SafariWhen comparing Gnome Terminal vs kitty, the Slant community recommends kitty for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux terminal emulators for low-resource machines?” kitty is ranked 6th while Gnome Terminal is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose kitty is:
Very elegant keyboard shortcuts for creating and navigating between tiled terminals within each tab with no appreciable lag.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Good integration with other GNOME-Shell apps
Gnome Terminal integrates well into Gnome Desktop, as well as the rest of the core Gnome Shell apps.
Pro Exceptionally fast
The Gnome Terminal is usually very fast. It boots up very quickly and takes less than a second (averages to 0.25-0.59 seconds) to display files of up to 600 MB.
Pro Support for tabs
Gnome Terminal allows for the use of tabs by right clicking in the terminal window and selecting open new tab or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+t by default.
Pro Supports scrolling
You can scroll up and down in Gnome terminal. And if you wish to do so, you can also hide the scrollbar.
Pro Solarized colors
Gnome Terminal comes with a solarized colorscheme installed and ready to use.
Pro Content re-flow when window is resized
When using the GNOME Terminal, if you have long lines of text inside it and then you change the window, the text will also automatically update according to the new window size.
Pro Notifications upon command completion
This isn't in the current release but in development versions you get notifications when commands are complete. This is great for long-running commands, relieving you from continuously checking to see if your command is done.
Pro Configurable keybindings
Configurable key bindings can be used for copy-paste, sending SIGINT, switching tabs, and so on.
Pro Transparency
We can change the alpha canal and see through the terminal.
Pro Open Source
Pro Drop-down support
Drop-down functionality can be added to Gnome Terminal via an extension.
Pro Clever memory management
Multiple terminals are managed from one gnome-terminal instance that takes up about 45 MB. Adding on other instances (with 10k lines of used buffer), each terminal requires about 16 MB of memory.
Pro Getting better and better over time
Tilix used to surpass gnome-terminal but right now they are both the best options unless you have special needs.
Pro Window tiling
Very elegant keyboard shortcuts for creating and navigating between tiled terminals within each tab with no appreciable lag.
Pro Extensible Kitten framework
Supports plugins to add features one at a time for those who need them. Examples include Unicode input and side-by-side diffs.
Pro Tabs for multiple instances
Operate several terminals from one window using the tabs feature, allowing you to make simultaneous connections to different remote hosts.
Pro Scrollback buffer viewer
Allows for viewing the scrollback buffer in an external pager of your choice ('less' by default, with support for 'more' and 'most'), a huge benefit for turning actions taken in a live terminal session into a script for efficiency or dissemination or collaborating on workflows.
Pro Controlled and configured from the shell prompt within the program itself
No graphical menus to clutter the screen saves system resources and time once you learn that all those options are still available from the command line within the app.
Cons
Con No background transparency
While this used to be a good option, background transparency has been removed.
Con Gnome library dependencies
While not an issue if using Gnome, when trying to use this terminal in other desktop environments or window managers there will be a large amount of dependencies tied to the app making for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean this may be an issue.
Con Font rendering doesn't look good
it seems that everything is fatter per default.
Con Heavyweight
To achieve a large amount of speed, Gnome Terminal has to use a relatively large amount of memory to run. It may eat up to 15-30 MB per instance, depending on the task it's doing.
Con No tab names
Since Gnome 3, the feature for manual renaming of tabs was reaped off.
Con Doesn't support font ligature still in 2019
gnome-terminal uses vte for its terminal emulator, and vte simply doesn't support font ligature (yes, it's 2019). This is what its maintainer thinks about it.
He really thinks supporting font ligature breaks terminal's grid, like he doesn't understand a font that's monospace is a monospace no matter if it has ligature or not.
Con Incomplete vt handling due to using libvte
Con Restrictive license
