When comparing cool-retro-term vs Xiki, the Slant community recommends cool-retro-term for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” cool-retro-term is ranked 18th while Xiki is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose cool-retro-term is:
Cool-retro-term mimics the look of old cathode screens. This is just aesthetic, but great for people who want a more retro feel.
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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 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.
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 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.