When comparing Terminator vs Yakuake, the Slant community recommends Terminator for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Terminator is ranked 3rd while Yakuake is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Terminator is:
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.
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Pros
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
Pro Drop-down terminal makes for ease of use
Yakuake is a drop-down terminal. This means that you can press, for example, F12, and it slides downward from the top edge of the screen. After you are done with it, you can then hit F12 again and it slides back on top.
Pro Very customizable
Almost everything in Yakuake is customizable: from split view, fullscreen mode, configurable dimensions, to animation speed and keybindings.
Pro Split layout
You can easily split any tab into different windows and run several commands at the same time then monitor and change them with ease. You won't find this feature in guake or tilda!
Pro Tabs support
Yakuake supports tabs, while working with several tabs is very easy. By default: to open a new tab press Ctrl + Shift + t
. To move through them: Shift + left/right arrow
.
Pro Monitor for activity/silence
When an activity is let working (e.g.: compiling some source or upgrading some system), and you forgot it, a nice popup and sound will alert you when the command prompt returned on that term.
Pro Unlimited scroll history
You can scroll, inside the same terminal session, infinitely, so no command should be lost, even it isn't stored yet on history.
Pro Lightweight
Opens at 40MB and stays below 100MB with some tabs splitted in four each. So if you need to have many terminals emulators opened in your desktop environment, is the a very light solution for all the features it includes.
Pro Quick search support
Search directly in your favourite search engine just by selecting something and right clicking. It will open the browser result page.
Pro Quick move through splits and tabs
You can move through terminals with Ctrl+Shift+Cursors or tabs with Shift+Cursor keys, so no need to touch you mouse or pad, making working with terms even faster.
Pro Can be scripted using qdbus
Window composition and commands inside can be scripted using qdbus.
You can make desktop shortcuts to automatically create tabs, split windows and connect to ssh sessions or launch monitoring programms. Very useful.
Pro Wayland support
As the entire Plasma Desktop, yakuake already has full support for Wayland.
Pro Save output as text
You can save the output of a terminal directly to a text file, to work properly with it later.
Pro Enhanced focused terminal
You can configure yakuake to show a visual altert when you change the terminal. So even if you have many splittings and you don't use the mouse to change between them, you can easily see where you are at any moment.
Cons
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 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 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 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 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.
Con Theming options are very limited, Does not integrate naturally with the DE
Con KDE Library dependencies
While not an issue if using KDE, 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. This makes for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean, this may be an issue.
Con No sessions support
Con No Windows support
Con Slow
Is not slow at all. I have yakuake installed in all my computers (8) and it launches immediatly after pressing the hotkey. Must be a error from yourt side.
Yakuake has started to get really slow with the latest updates: it takes up to 3 seconds to start up after you have clicked the assigned hotkey.
Con Heavy
Not true at all. I from far one of the lightiest graphical terminals out there. Mine is 14MB with a bunch of split views and 4 tabs at the moment of writing this.
