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Add to SafariWhen comparing software.jessies.org terminator 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 software.jessies.org terminator is ranked 36th. 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.
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
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 Seems to have been abandoned
There are several issues posted since 2013 on the project repository that have not yet been solved.
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.
