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Add to SafariWhen comparing cool-retro-term vs Hyper, the Slant community recommends Hyper for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Mac?” Hyper is ranked 6th while cool-retro-term is ranked 7th.
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Beautiful
Pro Great community support, extensions etc
Pro Fully customizable
If you are familiar with web standards, you will be at home in this terminal.
Pro Limited set of features out of the box
Very few features are built into the product itself as the intention is for the plugins to provide most of them. If a plugin doesn't exist just as you like, write it. That extensibility, folks.
Cons
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.
Con Limited set of features out of the box
Very few features are built into the product itself as the intention is for the plugins to provide most of them. Yet, taking the other listed con of immature plugin ecosystem into account, this leads to either living without the feature or using an unstable plugin.
Con Can be slow
Example benchmark against iTerm in this Youtube video.
Con Immature plugin ecosystem
Very often you'll find features behaving unexpectedly after installing plugins. Even the popular ones.
Con CJK languages not working
Con Needs an account to work and sends your commands to some server
Apart from the security implications this is slowing things down, making it sometimes unusable!
