When comparing Tilda vs cool-retro-term, the Slant community recommends Tilda for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Tilda is ranked 16th while cool-retro-term is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Tilda is:
The drop-down function in Tilda does not get in the way and can be accessed at any time with a keyboard shortcut.
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Pros
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 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 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 Mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens
Cool-retro-term mimics the look of old cathode screens. This is just aesthetic, but great for people who want a more retro feel.
Pro Good rendering
If you disable every special effect and the framing, the rendering is actually quite comfortable and readable making a good terminal option if you have CPU cycles to spare.
Pro Good fun
For simple tasks this is wonderful - anyone seeing it will love it, takes me back to using the Commodore Pet in college in the early 80's.
Pro Available in multiple repositories
This terminal is available for download from repositories in all the most popular distros, making it easily available.
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 very practical by today's standards
While it certainly has an aesthetic feel, cool-retro-term is nothing more than a cool trick if you want to play around. It's not very useful in this day and age.
Con Extremely heavy and impactful on resources
A massive amount of resources are used as graphical processing in cool-retro-term. They are ridiculously heavy for the terminal's intended use.
Con Large dependency on kde
It looks like many of the effects present here are provided by more or less stock kde effect libraries. For Gnome-based systems, installing this will pull in a large handful of kde libs.
