When comparing cool-retro-term vs WezTerm, 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 WezTerm is ranked 25th. 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
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 Supports multiple windows, tabs, splits/panes
tmux-like functionality with native UI even on Windows systems allows managing multiple terminal sessions how you like.
Pro Looks good
Highly customizable appearance and comes with over 240 built-in color schemes.
Pro Open Source and Free
Pro Supports font ligatures and stylistic sets
Ships with JetBrains Mono, a modern programmers font, so that you can enjoy modern typographical features such as contextual ligatures and font variations/stylistic sets in your terminal environment.
Pro GPU Accelerated
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 Lua learning curve for config
The only reason it would be difficult to recommend is that it's for experienced programmers.
