When comparing Tilix vs Babun, the Slant community recommends Babun for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” Babun is ranked 14th while Tilix is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose Babun is:
Babun comes with both bash and zsh out of the box. This gives both beginners and advanced users the choice of which shell to run.
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Pros
Pro Multiple sessions inside a single window
In addition to tiling, Tilix supports placing separate sessions in tabs or switching from one to another through a sidebar.
Pro Tiling makes for ease of use
The user can split terminals horizontally or vertically, according to their needs or preferences.
Pro Integrates nicely into GNOME 3
Tilix follows the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and uses the UI patterns of this desktop environment.
Pro Good alternative to Terminator
Tiling and ability to type into multiple terminals simultaneously is Terminator's 2 most significant features. Tilix has them as well.
Pro Configurable shortcuts
Many actions in Tilix can be triggered with configurable shortcuts.
Pro GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
Tilix follows GNOME HIG whereas gnome-terminal doesn't. GNOME should use Tilix as their default terminal.
Pro Transparent background
Unlike the standard GNOME Terminal, Tilix supports configurable background transparency.
Pro Fancy looks
Tilix has that new GNOME look, with a HeaderBar. It can also be disabled.
Pro Able to write into multiple terminals simultaneously
Inside a session, you can select multiple terminals, which will receive the same input simultaneously.
Pro Can be used as a drop-down terminal
The new 1.30 version of Tilix supports a quake mode enabling it to work as a drop-down terminal.
Pro Extremely fast
As fast as gnome-terminal, if not faster.
Pro Copy on select
Pro Faster than Gnome Terminal
When running commands it feels snappier.
Pro Easy
Pro Copy as HTML
You can copy text from the terminal as HTML for embedding in web settings.
Pro Lightweight
Pro Solarized themes built-in
Great support for solarized color schemes, and no setup is involved.
Pro Terminus can notify you about finished tasks and perform actions based on terminal output
Pro Comes with bash and zsh out of the box
Babun comes with both bash and zsh out of the box. This gives both beginners and advanced users the choice of which shell to run.
Pro Comes with a package manager
Babun come with a package manager called Pact, which is an extremely simple yet powerful package manager similar to apt-get
or yum
for Linux.
Pro Easy access to powerful zsh features through integrated oh-my-zsh
Oh-my-zsh is a dead simple configuration and management for zsh (which is a pretty powerful shell), allowing even first time users to take advantage of the most powerful features it offers.
Pro Extends Cygwin functionality
Babun is built on top of Cygwin, meaning that Unix or Linux applications can be compiled and run on a Windows operating system from within a Linux-like interface.
Pro Decent, out-of-the-box remoting to Unix and others
256 color xterm is simple, but many programs simply do it wrong. Babun uses well-established command-line programs that do it right, and which then wrap them in a nicely themed package.
Cons
Con Unmaintained
Bugs and pull requests are not processed.
Con No font ligatures
Con Takes a bit more memory than Gnome terminal
Would've expected this to be more lightweight.
Con Heavyweight
Tilix has quite a lot of dependencies and takes ~100MB of RAM when running.
Con Dead project
Babun is not maintained and uses an old version of Cygwin from 2015.
Con Cannot exit node.js programs
When trying to exit a node program using Ctrl-C, the process doesn't actually exit.
Con No tabs
Babun has no support for tabs.
Con No spinner when installing packages with gems or npm
Con Does not work with Ansible
Executing Ansible modules (which helps configure and manage computers that combine multi-node software deployment) causes errors to arise.