Cool Retro Term vs Hyper

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.

Hyper is a free terminal application for people working in a command-line interface. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with split panes, GPU acceleration, SSH support, and a scripting API. The project says speed and stability are priorities and uses xterm.js as its terminal engine. Users can configure the shell, environment variables, appearance, window size, scrollback, and other settings in .hyper.js, and change command bindings there as well. Themes and extensions provide additional ways to alter or intercept terminal behavior. Extensions are Node.js modules available on npm; the API lets plugins work with React components and Redux actions. Plugins can be reloaded with Command+R, and Hyper also loads them periodically or after plugin configuration changes. Downloads are listed for macOS, Windows, Debian, Fedora, and AppImage. The displayed latest version is v3.4.1.