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Add to SafariWhen comparing Terminology vs cool-retro-term, the Slant community recommends Terminology for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Terminology is ranked 9th while cool-retro-term is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Terminology is:
Font size in Terminology automatically scales according to window size. When you resize the window, so does the text.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Scalable fonts
Font size in Terminology automatically scales according to window size. When you resize the window, so does the text.
Pro Looks smashing
Terminals are often very dull looks wise, not so with terminology.
Pro In-terminal video, picture and thumbnail support
Thumbnails, pictures, and videos can all be rendered in-terminal, based on the directory listing or mouse interactions. For instance, using "ls" on a picture folder will produce a list of thumbnails instead of only the filenames.
Pro Splitable
You can split windows, like in terminator.
Pro Visually customizable
It is very customizable in every aspect of the visual options.
Pro Integrates well with Enlightenment WM
Terminology is part of the Enlightenment WM packages. As such, it integrates really well with Enlightenment and other tools in the package.
Pro Block copy
You can copy text in blocks.
Pro Copyfree licensing
Terminology uses the Simplified BSD License. As it is a copyfree license, it tends to minimize license incompatibilities, legal compliance requirements, and various other complexities that may make it difficult to understand certain licenses.
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 Configuration is sometimes complicated and non-obvious
There's a "Settings" menu for configuration, but more options there would make it easier. Downloading themes and extensions from the official repo would be a big plus.
Con No True-Color support
Not able to display a modern full range of colors, yet.
Con Scrollback is completely nroken
Scrolling back the emulator inserts random lines from other places in the scrollback buffer in between the actuall output lines. Thus it is impossible to see a correct copy of the previous output.
Con No scrollbar
The lack of scrollbar in Terminology makes navigation difficult. But you can use keys for it.
Con Too many bells and whistles
Some people feel that Terminology has too many features that are not suited for a terminal, but for a window manager instead. For instance, viewing thumbnails, watching videos and gifs, and other similarly flashy things just feel like eye candy and should not be part of a terminal emulator.
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.
