When comparing ROXTerm vs cool-retro-term, the Slant community recommends cool-retro-term for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” cool-retro-term is ranked 18th while ROXTerm is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose cool-retro-term is:
Cool-retro-term mimics the look of old cathode screens. This is just aesthetic, but great for people who want a more retro feel.
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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 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 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 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.