Terminator vs st

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.

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.

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).

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

Terminator allows the user to save, configure, and launch arrangements of windows, tabs, and terminals.

The scrollback lines can be set to a preferred value, or set to infinite scrollback.

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.

Many actions in Terminator can be triggered with configurable shortcuts.

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.

There is a standard notification pop-up that appears if a terminal is silent for a configurable period, or if it has new activity.

When not constrained by it's own general principles and unique features, Terminator tries to follow the GNOME-Terminal way of doing things.

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.

Every single aspect of Terminator is exhaustively documented, and can be quickly opened with the common shortcut F1 (which is configurable, of course).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

st is built to serve as a lightweight terminal emulator. It's very light and doesn't require many resources to run, making it able to run well on older and low-end machines.

st consists of a single C file that takes seconds to recompile. This also makes it very easy to understand and customize.

st supports color escape sequences for a full 16 million 24-bit color spectrum, instead of the typical 256 colors.

There is full XFT (X Free Type interface library) and fallback font support through fontconfig in st. If your selected font is missing a certain glyph or symbol, but one of your other installed fonts has it, it will be shown.

Copyfree licensing implies that the user has the freedom to copy, use, modify, and distribute what he/she possesses.

Handles image previews (e.g. in ranger) way better than other terminal emulators.

The patches on the site are great. Scroll back, hide the mouse, etc.

Hackable and lightweight.

it is extremely responsive and fast, even on older computers.

The terminal doesn't have any bloated features nobody uses. It is very minimal and extendable.