When comparing Xiki vs ROXTerm, the Slant community recommends ROXTerm for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” ROXTerm is ranked 21st while Xiki is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose ROXTerm is:
ROXTerm supports dragging and dropping items into the Terminal window.
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Pros
Pro Adds GUI features
Xiki uses some GUI concepts on top of shell. For example, commands can have nested menus and these menus are just text indented by two spaces. You can also either use the mouse or the keyboard to navigate or issue commands.
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.
Cons
Con Requires learning many new concepts and ways of using them
Xiki adds a lot of concepts which are not found on other terminals. You have to learn a lot of new tricks to make it useful which unfortunately you cannot use on other terminal emulators.
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.