When comparing Pantheon Terminal vs Tilix, the Slant community recommends Tilix for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Tilix is ranked 12th while Pantheon Terminal is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Tilix is:
In addition to tiling, Tilix supports placing separate sessions in tabs or switching from one to another through a sidebar.
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Pros
Pro End process notifications
When a process has ended, Pantheon Terminal sends a notification bubble to the desktop notification server and indicates which tab generated the notification.
Pro Can easily restore a previous session
Pantheon Terminal remembers the window size, position, windowed/maximized/fullscreen state, and open tabs in between sessions.
Pro Advanced tab handling
Using the Granite Dynamic Notebook widget (which includes tab close history), double click the tab bar for a new tab, duplicating tabs, quickly closing all other tabs, auto-hiding/revealing tab close buttons, etc.
Pro Smart copy and paste
The keyboard shortcut for copy + paste is intelligently adapted andnbased on text selection and clipboard state. This makes it possible to use standard copy + paste shortcuts without colliding with standard ctrl + c behavior in the Terminal.
Pro Search feature
Pro Multiple sessions inside a single window
In addition to tiling, Tilix supports placing separate sessions in tabs or switching from one to another through a sidebar.
Pro Tiling makes for ease of use
The user can split terminals horizontally or vertically, according to their needs or preferences.
Pro Integrates nicely into GNOME 3
Tilix follows the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and uses the UI patterns of this desktop environment.
Pro Good alternative to Terminator
Tiling and ability to type into multiple terminals simultaneously is Terminator's 2 most significant features. Tilix has them as well.
Pro Configurable shortcuts
Many actions in Tilix can be triggered with configurable shortcuts.
Pro GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
Tilix follows GNOME HIG whereas gnome-terminal doesn't. GNOME should use Tilix as their default terminal.
Pro Transparent background
Unlike the standard GNOME Terminal, Tilix supports configurable background transparency.
Pro Fancy looks
Tilix has that new GNOME look, with a HeaderBar. It can also be disabled.
Pro Able to write into multiple terminals simultaneously
Inside a session, you can select multiple terminals, which will receive the same input simultaneously.
Pro Can be used as a drop-down terminal
The new 1.30 version of Tilix supports a quake mode enabling it to work as a drop-down terminal.
Pro Extremely fast
As fast as gnome-terminal, if not faster.
Pro Copy on select
Pro Faster than Gnome Terminal
When running commands it feels snappier.
Pro Easy
Pro Copy as HTML
You can copy text from the terminal as HTML for embedding in web settings.
Pro Lightweight
Pro Solarized themes built-in
Great support for solarized color schemes, and no setup is involved.
Pro Terminus can notify you about finished tasks and perform actions based on terminal output
Cons
Con Heavy
Con limited customization options
Con RAM usage increases considerably over time
There is a RAM leak when using the Pantheon Terminal that adds up over time and use.
Con Incompatible with LTS Ubuntu
Pantheon is developed and binaries are released for a near blessing edge operating system (elementary OS). As such, installing it on an LTS Ubuntu system may be nearly impossible without replacing a large portion of the LTS stack that Ubuntu-targeted software expects.
Con Restrictive license
Con Unmaintained
Bugs and pull requests are not processed.
Con No font ligatures
Con Takes a bit more memory than Gnome terminal
Would've expected this to be more lightweight.
Con Heavyweight
Tilix has quite a lot of dependencies and takes ~100MB of RAM when running.