When comparing cool-retro-term vs Terminal.app, the Slant community recommends Terminal.app for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Mac?” Terminal.app is ranked 3rd while cool-retro-term is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Terminal.app is:
Since it is already installed by default, you don't need to worry about finding and installing another terminal.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Default terminal on Mac
Since it is already installed by default, you don't need to worry about finding and installing another terminal.
Pro Light on System Resources
Terminal.app lighter uses less system resources than iTerm having the same number of windows, tabs and processes going on.
Pro Great compatibility
Works with everything.
Pro Easily open man pages
By right clicking on a highlighted string you can easily search through the man pages for that string and the man page will open in a nice pop up window.
Pro Excellent xterm emulation support
Pro Beautiful
Terminal has nice colors and font options.
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 Updates are released rarely
Terminal usually gets an update when any new MacOS version is released, which is every couple of years.
Con Tab names are volatile
The tab names never stick -- it's imperative that this should work.
Con Background images are stretched rather than clipped
Con Occasionally crashes
Working remotely with a full buffer may cause complete terminal app crash.