When comparing Tilda vs Guake, the Slant community recommends Guake for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux terminal emulators?” Guake is ranked 10th while Tilda is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Guake is:
You can hit F12 (by default, though it's customizable) to open a terminal overlay, Quake-style, as a drop-down from the top of the screen.
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Pros
Pro Highly customizable
There are tons of customizations you can make: from adding colors to text, turning backgrounds transparent, setting the size to be "maximized", toggling scrollbar on and off, adjusting orientation/borders/animation, etc.
Pro Easily accessible drop-down
The drop-down function in Tilda does not get in the way and can be accessed at any time with a keyboard shortcut.
Pro Few dependencies
Tilda is a very minimal and lean terminal emulator. It requires very few dependencies and the amount of resources needed is small.
Pro Supports transparency
You can monitor information displayed by applications under Tilda.
Pro Tabs support
Tilda supports tabs. By default: to open a new tab press Ctrl + Shift + t. To move through them: Ctrl + PgUp/PgDn.
Pro Drop-down terminal
You can hit F12 (by default, though it's customizable) to open a terminal overlay, Quake-style, as a drop-down from the top of the screen.
Pro Supports transparency
Transparency is particularly useful for when you need to refer to the information displayed by application under Guake window.
Pro Hotkey support
Guake is very fast and easy to open with a customizable hotkey, meaning there's no fiddling with menus or icons.
Pro Extremely customizable
Guake's appearance is very customizable: from the transparency to the width and height of the window. You can also choose which key to use for toggling the terminal window.
Pro Available in many popular distro repositories
Guake is available in a lot of repositories for the most popular distros. This makes it very easy to obtain and install on almost any system.
Pro Shortcut key F12 can be used to toggle
The global shortcut key, F12, can be used to easily toggle the terminal window.
Pro Tabs support
Guake supports tabs, while working with them is very easy.
Pro Can choose byobu as shell
You can choose byobu as shell, by adding a line to /etc/shells : " /usr/bin/byobu"
and get guake with byobu ... sweet!
Cons
Con Contains some annoying bugs
Tilda can be buggy at times. For example, if you don't close it before shutdown, it may prompt you to reconfigure it all over again on the next boot.
Con Not cross-platform
Linux only, and additionally targeting GTK3.
Con Not very responsive
Occasionally, Guake slows down and is not very responsive.
Con No font ligature
Guake uses vte for its terminal emulation, 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.
