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Add to SafariWhen comparing cool-retro-term vs Tabby Terminal, the Slant community recommends cool-retro-term for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Mac?” cool-retro-term is ranked 7th while Tabby Terminal is ranked 8th. 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.
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 It looks just beautiful
Pro It's open source
This helps the community to move software forward and to make it even better.
Pro It comes with plugins
Pro Customizable
A lot of things can be easily configured, e.g. color theme, size, window frame behavior, tab location, cursor style, hotkeys, etc.
Pro Is cross-platform
Even the question was "...for Windows", it's nice if you can use your tools over different platforms.
Pro Under active development
Hyper development has basically stalled out.
Pro Excellent interface
At start opens last session terminals. Also has terminal tabs.
Pro Integrated GitBash, Cmd, PowerShell, and WSL
Pro Integrates with git-bash with a simple toggle in the interface
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 Some functions still fail
Con Graphics bugs on all platforms
On Windows 10 and Debian 11, Debian 12 the graphics starts bug after some usage. It always happens, even on different computers.
Con Slow with input lag
Sadly, Electron strikes again. The input lag is noticeable and annoying. Startup also takes like 2 seconds or more (On an i7 from 2016 with SSD).
Con 80MB
It's huge. The amount of resources it consumes is not justifiable.
Con Cannot remove the default profiles
For example, you installed Arch Linux for Windows Subsystem for Linux some time ago, but now you have deleted it and currently use Ubuntu on WSL. After that, if you decide to try this terminal emulator, you'll find Arch there without an option to remove the profiles already included in Terminus.
