When comparing Guake vs Sakura, the Slant community recommends Sakura for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Sakura is ranked 6th while Guake is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Sakura is:
Sakura has very few dependencies, it's very lightweight, and great if your computer does not have many resources.
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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 Lightweight
Sakura has very few dependencies, it's very lightweight, and great if your computer does not have many resources.
Pro True colour support
Supports full 24-bit color.
Pro Great unicode support
Even shows combining chars correctly.
Pro Few dependencies
Pro Starts quickly even on lower-end machines
Sakura's quick start-up time becomes noticeable with lower-end machine's such as Eeepc 1015PX (Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz and 2 GB of RAM).
Pro Tab support
Pro Easy zoom
Sakura supports zooming through keyboard keys (Ctrl+'+'
to zoom in and Ctrl+'-'
to zoom out).
Pro Ready for wayland
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 libvte/gtk
It has gnome dependencies.
Con Doesn't provide many configuration options
Sakura does not have any advanced configuration capabilities.
