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Add to SafariWhen comparing rxvt-unicode vs Terminator, the Slant community recommends rxvt-unicode for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” rxvt-unicode is ranked 1st while Terminator is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose rxvt-unicode is:
Rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Low memory usage
Rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM.
Pro Can be daemonized to reduce resource usage
For those who want to lower their system's resource usage, rxvt-unicode allows for daemonization. This way you can run several instances of urxvt inside a single process.
Pro Supports terminal transparency
Changing the transparency of the terminal is allowed for in rxvt-unicode. This not only makes for eye candy but is also good for GUI usability.
Pro Minimum dependencies and simple text config
Pro Supports multiple font types
Multiple font types can be displayed flawlessly in rxvt-unicode.
Pro Handles bold text colour properly
Displays characters with text attribute bold actually as bold glyphs.
Pro High performance
Rxvt-unicode is much faster than most alternatives.
Pro Unicode support
International language support is provided through Unicode.
Pro Proper wrapping support
During selection and pasting wrapped text doesn't break into lines at place of wrapping.
Pro Fast text rendering
Rxvt-unicode has very fast text rendering, being able to render hundreds of MB of text in a very short time.
Pro Built-in Perl interpreter
It has a built-in Perl interpreter, meaning that no install is needed. Simply run urxvtperl.
Pro Multiple terminal panes to suit user's needs
It is possible to split the terminal window into several areas and you can re-size them as needed. Multiple windows and tabs are also supported.
Pro Highly customizable
You can change the size, color, and give different shapes to the terminal. You can also save multiple layouts and profiles via the GUI preferences editor.
Pro Can type on multiple grouped terminals simultaneously
You can type at the same time on any number of arbitrarily grouped terminals. (Or all at once, or only the focussed, all switchable with a shortcut or menu item).
Pro Extendable functionality through plugins
Terminator functionality can be extended via plugins. Examples of this include:
- Custom commands
- URL handlers (on top of common ones) for apt, launchpad, maven
- Logging output to file
Pro Save and launch layouts of terminals
Terminator allows the user to save, configure, and launch arrangements of windows, tabs, and terminals.
Pro Configurable scrollback buffer
The scrollback lines can be set to a preferred value, or set to infinite scrollback.
Pro Can act as a drop-down terminal
If you want to use Terminator as a drop-down terminal, you can do so by editing the config file and set whichever key you want to use as a trigger.
Pro Configurable shortcuts
Many actions in Terminator can be triggered with configurable shortcuts.
Pro Both true and fake transparency
If you have a compositor, you can use true transparency. You can also have a fake transparency where an image can be used as a fake desktop. Both of these can be tinted with the background color too.
Pro Desktop notifications on silence and/or activity
There is a standard notification pop-up that appears if a terminal is silent for a configurable period, or if it has new activity.
Pro Familiar to GNOME-Terminal users
When not constrained by it's own general principles and unique features, Terminator tries to follow the GNOME-Terminal way of doing things.
Pro Zoom and Maximize a single terminal for aiding focus
You can zoom (font size increases) or maximize (font size does not increase) a single terminal to fill the whole window with a shortcut. All the other terminals remain open, they are just hidden from sight, and everything is restored by repeating the shortcut.
Pro Comes with an extensive manual
Every single aspect of Terminator is exhaustively documented, and can be quickly opened with the common shortcut F1 (which is configurable, of course).
Pro User-friendly
Terminator has tabs, drag and drop re-ordering of terminals, and lots of keyboard shortcuts to help the user. It also has an extensive preferences window, or if you have to, a plain text config file.
Pro Tries to reduce resource usage through DBus
Unless this option is disabled (it's enabled by default), Terminator will only run the first instance as a process. And when it's run again, the DBus server will simply open a new window using the old process. This helps a lot with reducing resource usage.
Pro Can save logs
Terminator has a really helpful functionality that lets the user start/stop a logger in order to save the text written in the shell into a file. In order to do this, the user needs to turn on the logging plugin in the plugin settings, and then a "start logger" menu item will appear in a right click menu when using the terminal. The user is also able to pick the path they would like the logs saved to when turning the plugin on.
Pro Content reflow when a terminal is resized
If you have long lines of text inside a terminal and then you change the size of the terminal, the text will also automatically update according to the new size.
Pro Can be driven by a script through DBus
Some activities can be scripted using a tool called remotinator which uses the DBus interface to command the application to perform a limited set of tasks.
Pro Tilix Config is easy and flexible
Cons
Con Unicode characters that are too wide are blanked instead of clipped
If a character in a backup font is wider than the base font, urxvt substitutes the non-displayable character. A large letter space will show the wide characters, but the result is not reasonably spaced. There is a patch from 2014 that the urxvt maintainer will not merge.
Con Requires work to look acceptable
Out of the box, rxvt-unicode is not too pleasant to look at. Some understanding of Xresources is required for updating its appearance. That being said, the experience of customizing it can be very rewarding.
Con Requires work to configure useful functionality (clickable URL's, font scaling, tabs)
Con In daemon mode you can lose all your terminals
Because of sharing the same process terminal windows cannot be killed without sacrificing all other open windows. That becomes even more dangerous if you use multiple graphical managers without overriding socket with RXVT_SOCKET.
Con Unicode rendering is buggy
There are a few references to urxvt's buggy rendering, such as unicode combining characters, which bled through during scrolling.
Con Bloated
Exists because Xterm is complete trash. Although it has a lot of features, you will most likely never use them all.
Con No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"
Though this is still not available, you can download the patched version for 24bit, here.
Con Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel
Sometimes you may need to enlarge the font to improve readability, or shrink it to have more real estate and "hawk's eye" view of data. In rxvt you need to change the configuration file or use these commands:
$ function fontsize
{printf '\33]50;%s%d\007' "xft:Dejavu Sans Mono:size=$1::antialias=false"}
$ fontsize 22
Con No option to have a "reverse color" cursor
While you can choose the color of the cursor and the character under the cursor, there's no automatic "reverse color" for the cursor. This makes it impossible to use rxvt-unicode if you have a light background terminal and a dark background editor.
Con Heavyweight
Due to its many features, Terminator can be a bit heavyweight and with lots of dependencies. This makes it unsuitable for old machines or computers with low resources.
Con Poor text search
Text search in Terminator does not highlight matching patterns when found. It just shows the row containing one of the matching patterns at the top of the terminal. This way text search is still usable, but not the best.
Con Starting up can be slow
Terminator can be pretty slow (as far as terminals go) when first starting up.
Con Buggy and crashy
Crashes and closes many times a day when using split (and unsplit) shortcuts. The developers don't accept a bug report if isn't critical or not easy to reproduce.
Con Bug - unable enter text after a while
A while after having a terminal window open, entering text is impossible. The terminal just sits there, not frozen, but with an empty command line.
Con Unable to specify startup window dimensions
Some users like their terminal windows to be a particular number of characters wide and tall. The default is 80x24 but some prefer something larger. Manually resizing every new instance gets old fast.
Con Updating terminal layouts via the preferences window is hard
It's easy to save & name your current layout, but it's hard to edit it. Especially when you use custom startup commands per pane.
Con Multiple line copy and paste does not work correctly.
If an output line wraps onto two lines copying and pasting it will insert a line break character between the two lines even though the was no line break in the original output. Thus it is impossible to copy/paste lines longer than the terminal width.
Con It uses the GTK VTE widget which does not support newest features
Newer and, admittedly, non-standard terminal features can't be used in Terminator.
Con Cannot disable zooming
The ctrl + mouse scroll key binding can't be disabled.
Con Redundant
Just use tmux instead.
Con Ugly looking
The interface and the preferences window look outdated.
