Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing cool-retro-term vs Alacritty, the Slant community recommends Alacritty for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Alacritty is ranked 7th while cool-retro-term is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Alacritty is:
Written in Rust with a philosophy focusing on speed and simplicity, Alacritty is one of the fastest terminal emulators out there.
Specs
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 Blazing fast rendering with GPU-accelerated
Written in Rust with a philosophy focusing on speed and simplicity, Alacritty is one of the fastest terminal emulators out there.
Pro Looks good
Alacritty looks very slick on Linux, especially with GNOME or i3.
Pro Simple configuration
The configuration file is very well made and easy to use. You can fine tune your preferences to perfection in a matter of minutes.
Pro Comprehensive font options
Alacritty can be configured to adjust line spacing (height), letter spacing (width), and individual character horizontal/vertical positions.
Pro Has support for image previews in w3m and ranger
Pro Has text ref-low when window is resized
Pro Fast and simple but with true color support
It's simple and fast like xterm or urxvt but with truecolor support which is a big plus if you use a terminal based code editor. Basically Alacritty has all the features you need and nothing you don't (if you're using tmux for multiplexing).
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 Cannot into ligatures
Alacritty does not support ligatures in Fira Code, Iosevka etc.
Con Unreliable Font Rendering
Like a box of chocolate you never know what you're going to get.
Con Sacrifices basic features for raw performance
The Suzuki GSXR of terminals. Or your ditzy, blonde high school cheerleader; fast and pretty but not a lot going on under the hood.
Eschews a negative developmental philosophy towards including said functionality, with the official reason cited in project documentation as "Not within the realm of a terminal emulator" and ostensibly, "best left up to other tools such as terminal multiplexers" [such as screen or tmux]. Which is unfortunate when you factor in speed against terminal with the functionality built in vs their reliance on 3rd party tools:
tmux on alacritty: 'find /usr' time: 3.234s, cpu: 72%
tmux on konsole: find /usr' time: 1.777s, cpu: 96%
See issue here.
