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Add to SafariWhen comparing cool-retro-term vs Extraterm, 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 Extraterm is ranked 40th. 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 speed
not the fastest ever, but for me its a good comprimise of features vs performance
Pro Cross platform
Pro Supports tab, splits and panes
You can set up your own layout with multiple splits and tabs.
Pro Shell integration
The shell integration makes it possible to group in command output in "frames" which show success/failure.
Pro Image support
You can view images and other data types like audio directly in the terminal.
Pro Keyboard based text selection
It is possible to go into a cursor mode where you can select text just like in a text editor. It even supports multiple cursors.
Pro Global shortcuts
You can configure global shortcuts to open the terminal.
Pro Keyboard friendly "Command Palette"
Just like Sublime, Atom and VSCode you can easily search and find commands from the drop down Command Palette.
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.
