Cool Retro Term vs mintty

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.

mintty is a free Windows terminal emulator for Cygwin, MSYS, MSYS2, related projects, and WSL. It provides xterm-compatible emulation and DEC terminal screen controls, with 256 colours, True Colour, Unicode, bidirectional text, emoji, Arabic shaping, image display, Sixel, ReGIS, and Tektronix 4014 graphics emulation. Input features include configurable shortcuts, Unicode composition, AltGr, Windows IME, mouse modes, selection, copy and paste, drag and drop, and Ctrl-click opening of files or URLs. Window features include virtual tabs, session switching, fullscreen, transparency, multiple monitors, and high DPI. Options can be supplied on the command line or in a text configuration file, without registry entries. mintty is the default Cygwin Terminal, installed by default in MSYS2, included with Git for Windows as Git Bash, and able to host WSL. It omits PuTTY networking functionality; the project points to OpenSSH and inetutils packages instead. The listed latest release is 3.8.3.