When comparing Guake vs Pantheon Terminal, the Slant community recommends Guake for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Guake is ranked 11th while Pantheon Terminal is ranked 17th. 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 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 End process notifications
When a process has ended, Pantheon Terminal sends a notification bubble to the desktop notification server and indicates which tab generated the notification.
Pro Can easily restore a previous session
Pantheon Terminal remembers the window size, position, windowed/maximized/fullscreen state, and open tabs in between sessions.
Pro Advanced tab handling
Using the Granite Dynamic Notebook widget (which includes tab close history), double click the tab bar for a new tab, duplicating tabs, quickly closing all other tabs, auto-hiding/revealing tab close buttons, etc.
Pro Smart copy and paste
The keyboard shortcut for copy + paste is intelligently adapted andnbased on text selection and clipboard state. This makes it possible to use standard copy + paste shortcuts without colliding with standard ctrl + c behavior in the Terminal.
Pro Search feature
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 Heavy
Con limited customization options
Con RAM usage increases considerably over time
There is a RAM leak when using the Pantheon Terminal that adds up over time and use.
Con Incompatible with LTS Ubuntu
Pantheon is developed and binaries are released for a near blessing edge operating system (elementary OS). As such, installing it on an LTS Ubuntu system may be nearly impossible without replacing a large portion of the LTS stack that Ubuntu-targeted software expects.