xterm vs Yakuake

Xterm is a very lightweight terminal. It requires few resources, allowing it to run well even on lower-end machines.

If you master xterm, you won't have to learn another tty, since it is in almost every Linux distribution.

Xterm is installed as standard software with the X Window system, and is there even when installing other terminal emulators.

Many terminal emulators that deal with wider fallback fonts (i.e. double-wide characters in CJK fonts) truncate display of wide characters, show Unicode "missing glyph" characters, or simply fail to display the characters at all. XTerm is "smart" enough to simply take up the extra space needed to show such wide characters.

See this.

Many terminal applications, such as OS X's Terminal.app and iTerm2 (among others), all claim xterm or xterm- variants as their $TERM and aim for support of xterm's escape sequences. Many command-line applications will assume or even hard-code escape-sequences and behavior for xterm and those terminals emulating it.

X Toolkit resources and xrdb predates what is currently called "theme". Although one needs to read man, mitigates most listed cons

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.

Almost everything in Yakuake is customizable: from split view, fullscreen mode, configurable dimensions, to animation speed and keybindings.

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!

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.

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.

You can scroll, inside the same terminal session, infinitely, so no command should be lost, even it isn't stored yet on history.

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.

Search directly in your favourite search engine just by selecting something and right clicking. It will open the browser result page.

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.

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.

As the entire Plasma Desktop, yakuake already has full support for Wayland.

You can save the output of a terminal directly to a text file, to work properly with it later.

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.