When comparing ROXTerm vs QTerminal, the Slant community recommends QTerminal for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” QTerminal is ranked 20th while ROXTerm is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose QTerminal is:
QTerminal support font ligatures found in fonts like FiraCode.
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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 Font ligatures
QTerminal support font ligatures found in fonts like FiraCode.
Pro Lightweight
Compared to many terminal emulators, QTerminal is lightweight with fewer dependencies than most.
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 Window resize
Resizing the window does not resize the contents, like rxvt-unicode does.
Con Strange default paste action
When pasting into QTerminal, one has to be careful as it assumes immediate execution.