Cmder vs Cool Retro Term

Cmder is a free, portable console emulator package for Windows. It uses ConEmu with Clink enhancements, a Monokai color scheme, and a custom prompt layout. Tabs can run cmd.exe, PowerShell, Bash, and Mintty shells. The package supports split panes, a scripting API, and SSH. Settings, aliases, and history can travel with Cmder on a USB stick or in the cloud. The Full edition includes Git for Windows and its Unix commands in PATH; Mini excludes vendored Git binaries. Aliases are configured with the alias command and stored in config/aliases, while executable files placed in bin are added to PATH. Registering with /REGISTER ALL adds a “Cmder Here” option to File Explorer. The documentation describes starting the vendored SSH agent with start-ssh-agent. Mini is a roughly 7.8MB download; Full is about 100MB or 52MB as a 7z archive. The project is licensed under MIT.

Cool Retro Term is a free, open-source terminal emulator for Linux and macOS that imitates the appearance of cathode-ray tube screens. The project describes it as customizable and reasonably lightweight. A context menu exposes color, font, and visual-effect settings. Community profiles can add flicker, scanline rasterization, screen curvature, static noise, and burn-in effects, while the wiki invites users to share themes and provides JSON examples. Release notes list support for multiple tabs and windows, plus shortcuts for tab management. Cool Retro Term uses the QML port of qtermwidget, a terminal widget based on Konsole. Linux users can download an AppImage or find packages in repositories for distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. macOS users can download a DMG. Build information covers Qt6 requirements, Linux Qt5 dependencies, and qmake instructions. Installation, build, theme, and widget guidance appears in the project wiki.