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Add to SafariWhen comparing Guake vs st, the Slant community recommends st for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” st is ranked 8th while Guake is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose st is:
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.
Question Ranking
Pros
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!
Pro Low memory usage
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.
Pro Extremely simple architecture
st consists of a single C file that takes seconds to recompile. This also makes it very easy to understand and customize.
Pro 24-bit "True Color" support
st supports color escape sequences for a full 16 million 24-bit color spectrum, instead of the typical 256 colors.
Pro Support for fontconfig
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.
Pro Copyfree licensing
Copyfree licensing implies that the user has the freedom to copy, use, modify, and distribute what he/she possesses.
Pro Image previews
Handles image previews (e.g. in ranger) way better than other terminal emulators.
Pro Patches are great
The patches on the site are great. Scroll back, hide the mouse, etc.
Pro Minimalist
Hackable and lightweight.
Pro Blazing fast
it is extremely responsive and fast, even on older computers.
Pro Clean
The terminal doesn't have any bloated features nobody uses. It is very minimal and extendable.
Cons
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.
Con Configuration requires recompiling
Though recompilation takes seconds, knowledge of C header files is required for customization (though it's pretty easy to do for someone who knows how to edit config files).
Con Text is cut off when resizing windows
In the vanilla build, when reducing windows, lines do not wrap, they are cut off. When the window is made large again, some of the text is missing.
Con Crashes when some characters or colored fonts are displayed
Con No scrollback by default
The best way to perform scrollback is to use a multiplexer (such as tmux, screen, or dvtm) if you want scrollback and reverse-search support.
Con New features means installing patches
Just to get copy/paste support and scrolling, you have to install patches. And it's not that intuitive for a beginner.
Con Internal border/margins
Doesn't support internal margins.
Con Source code edits (aka configs) need to be redone after updating
Con Imperfect fontconfig support for CJK characters
It [st] doesn't seem to use CJK fonts provided by fontconfig while other programs use such fonts.
