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Comment by jpsim | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure I'm missing iTerm2's big appeal, but every time I try to use it, I find myself going back to Terminal.app, which I find more responsive and just as featureful, especially when combined with zsh and a windowing manager. That's probably just because I'm familiar with it and I didn't come from tmux or anything similar, but I keep hoping I'll be "enlightened" at some point and realize the error of my ways ;)

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https://medium.com/@xanderdunn/iterm2-vs-terminal-c06976f106...

Thanks for that, although it similarly hasn't swayed me :D

Which one is the killer feature? The ones listed in that article all seem like extremely minor differences to me.

> Customizability ends up being pretty important for serious developers who are always in the terminal.

Ironically, I would say customizability ends up being pretty important for serious developers attempting to avoid working. I can't say my terminal itself—as opposed to the shell—requires any serious modifications at all. (I rewire the left option key and color schemes, and that's about it.)

I usually use iTerm2, but I tried to switch to Terminal the other day because I noticed how much more responsive it is. There were a couple small things that kept me with iTerm2:

- Both let you set the cursor color, but Terminal doesn't let you set the cursor text color, which is a small annoyance.

- Terminal's full-screen goes into a separate desktop, but iTerm2 lets you disable Lion-style full-screen - another small annoyance.

- The only real deal-breaker for me was that I couldn't get Ctrl-/ working for Terminal (it's what I use for "undo" in emacs and readline).

Even with these things, I tried for a while to get Terminal set up - the faster refresh rate makes it look _really_ smooth compared to iTerm2.

Same. I've tried it several times and have had the same experience you describe. Terminal.app recently got a nice upgrade too, which made switching to a 3rd party emulator even less compelling.

Edit: I tried the beta. It's faster than .app. I'll give it that.

All the more power to you. If it works fine for you then it's good enough. Apple has also really caught up on Terminal.app's features. For example it didn't used to have multiple tabs which was a killer feature of iTerm. Personally, I don't even use most of the power features of iTerm except the custom shortcuts. (even preferring to use tmux directly) Still, some alternatives never hurt.

Command clicking on backtraces to open that line in my editor is pretty bloody great. Although if you've rigged up some way to do that with the keyboard alone you're unlikely to be impressed I suppose.

It seems to resolve paths relative to the working directory and passes them to `open`. It works for URLs too.

I use iTerm2 because I can switch tabs using Command+1 / Command+2 etc.

I've found it so good, I switched to using Terminator on Linux. Terminator sort of mimics iTerm2's multi-pane layout, which I find indispensable on high resolution displays.

tmux4life

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