When comparing ROXTerm vs Xfce4 terminal, the Slant community recommends Xfce4 terminal for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Xfce4 terminal is ranked 4th while ROXTerm is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Xfce4 terminal is:
Like other applications included in the Xfce package, this terminal emulator is very lightweight and doesn't require many resources to run. This makes it perfect for systems that have low specs.
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Pros
Pro Drag and drop
ROXTerm supports dragging and dropping items into the Terminal window.
Pro Advanced D-Bus usage
In ROXTerm, users can use D-Bus to configure terminals from other applications, allowing for communication between multiple computer programs.
Pro Includes a configuration manager
ROXTerm includes a configuration manager which can easily be run by selecting Configure...
in the terminal's menu, or by simply running roxterm-config
. You can then easily swap configuration files with other users, manage profiles, and customize things like color schemes or keyboard shortcuts.
Pro Supports GTK3
ROXTerm uses the latest GTK widget set which is great a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.
Pro Good for systems with low specs
Like other applications included in the Xfce package, this terminal emulator is very lightweight and doesn't require many resources to run. This makes it perfect for systems that have low specs.
Pro True transparency
You can set the transparency of the Xfce4 terminal on any amount you want, out of the box.
Pro Tabs support
Xfce4 fully supports tabs and tab-based navigation.
Pro Almost everything is customizable
You can configure size, color, background, etc.
Pro Composition effects
Xfce4 terminal takes advantage of xfce composition effects.
Pro Fast rendering
Pro Can be switched to a drop-down terminal
You can configure the Xfce-terminal to act as a dropdown terminal if you want, which makes for greater ease of use.
Cons
Con Uncertain future
The original developer, Tony Houghton, declared the death of Roxterm on 2016-05 at https://sourceforge.net/p/roxterm/discussion/422638/thread/60da6975/?limit=25#3fc9.
In 2018, work began to resume on Github rather than Sourceforge (https://github.com/realh/roxterm/issues/1) but the future maintenance is uncertain.
Con Not for regular users
ROXTerm is made for power users who spend most of their time on the terminal. For a regular user using ROXTerm it would be an overkill.
Con Cannot set text color for character under cursor to background color
Suppose you have a dark background with a light cursor and light foreground color: the light cursor will cover up whatever character it is on, so that you cannot read it. There is no option to set the foreground color for the character under the cursor to what is normally the background color. Such an option would allow you to read the character under the cursor.
Con Execution in xfce4-terminal - e mode is not always functional
Con Resizing text resizes window
Con No profiles
There's no profiles or profile-based customization in Xfce-terminal.
Con Can't scroll on spamming text
When text generates too fast, you can't scroll it, so you just can't read anything in such moments.