When comparing st vs software.jessies.org terminator, the Slant community recommends st for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux terminal emulators?” st is ranked 2nd while software.jessies.org terminator is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose st is:
st consists of a single C file that takes seconds to recompile. This also makes it very easy to understand and customize.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Extremely simple architecture
st consists of a single C file that takes seconds to recompile. This also makes it very easy to understand and customize.
Pro Low memory usage
st is built to serve as a lightweight terminal emulator. It's very light and doesn't require many resources to run, making it able to run well on older and low-end machines.
Pro 24-bit "True Color" support
st supports color escape sequences for a full 16 million 24-bit color spectrum, instead of the typical 256 colors.
Pro Support for fontconfig
There is full XFT (X Free Type interface library) and fallback font support through fontconfig in st. If your selected font is missing a certain glyph or symbol, but one of your other installed fonts has it, it will be shown.
Pro Copyfree licensing
Copyfree licensing implies that the user has the freedom to copy, use, modify, and distribute what he/she possesses.
Pro UTF-8 support enables character encoding
Due to UTF-8, this terminator won't mangle your favorite accented characters, and it copes well with languages where there's a mix of normal and wide glyphs (such as Greek).
Pro Unlimited scrollback
Terminator won't throw away output when it scrolls off the top of the screen, nor when it reaches any arbitrary limit.
Pro Multiple tabs
This is just like tabbed browsing, only with terminals, and means that multiple pages or documents are contained in a single window.
Pro Horizontal scrolling
Most terminal emulators wrap text when it intrudes upon the right margin. Terminator doesn't; it instead provides a horizontal scrollbar when necessary.
Cons
Con Configuration requires recompiling
Though recompilation takes seconds, knowledge of C header files is required for customization.
Con No scrollback
The best way to perform scrollback is to use a multiplexer (such as tmux, screen, or dvtm) if you want scrollback and reverse-search support.
Con Text is cut off when resizing windows
When reducing windows, lines do not wrap, they are cut off. When the window is made large again, some of the text is missing.
Con Imperfect fontconfig support for CJK characters
st doesn't seem to use CJK fonts provided by fontconfig while other programs use such fonts.
Con Seems to have been abandoned
There are several issues posted since 2013 on the project repository that have not yet been solved.