iTerm2 version 3 beta released | Hacker News Reader

iTerm2 version 3 beta released

iterm2.com

125 pointsjbverschoor59 comments

>iTerm2 has been updated for the modern Mac OS X "flat" look and is stunningly beautiful.

No, it is not "stunningly beautiful." Don't get me wrong, it looks GREAT, but c'mon, the definitions of those words just don't apply here.

I'm sad that Apple's over-the-top keynote/ad language continues to spread. Let's have some restraint, folks!

Thanks for that stunningly beautiful commentary. /s

Never crossed your mind that it could be tongue-in-cheek given that it's a terminal emulator for Apple platforms, eh?

I mean, the Twitter announcement included a Ron Paul GIF[0]. I'm just saying, maybe the pitchforks are a bit premature on this one. Jony Ive's not stumping for iTerm2 v3 Mk. IV.

[0]: https://twitter.com/gnachman/status/737747033067376640

No it hadn't, but looking at it, you're right that that could could be the intent. If so, perhaps my crankiness towards such things (it's not just this project that uses such phrases) projected itself into a comment at the wrong moment.

In any event, if it is meant to be tongue-in-cheek it could stand a bit of a rewrite anyway since in that case, it isn't over the top enough to make its intent clear. :-) The big tag above is "iTerm2 is a terminal emulator for OS X that does amazing things." "Amazing" is also over-the-top, but again not enough if trying for parody.

It' a bit of a poe (look up poe's law if you're unfamiliar). It's hard to tell whether they mean it or not. If parody, throw in a few "magicals" and such and my thick brain would get the clue.

Perhaps it's my grey beard showing, but after getting the 2.9 beta some few months ago and trying shell integration... I hated it. It took away all of the speed gains iTerm had gotten, and offered remarkably little benefit.

I already have history. I already have my git branch and $? in my $PS1. The restore functionality attempts to run across intentional shutdowns and box restarts, mucking with an otherwise clean terminal. I've yet to find a practical use for multiple profiles, let alone automated profile switching.

Can we just keep getting speed and polish, and set aside the new features for awhile?

Agreed on the shell integration, I had to take it out again because it made switching directories unbearably slow. The inline images however are absolutely magical. See e.g. the screenshot in https://github.com/mbauman/AxisArrays.jl#example-of-currentl...

>I've yet to find a practical use for multiple profiles

I use them all the time with GNOME terminal. I prefer different themes/fonts for different applications. If you have trouble seeing and need some apps that don't allow you to configure the colors to have a high contrast theme you can just use a specific profile for that app. Plus I like switching between dark and light and medium themes on the fly.

> let alone automated profile switching.

Personally, I wanted to use it for making the terminal look different (different background colour) when switching to a root shell. Then I found I would have to install the shell integration in the root environment of every host I would ever admin. That turns it into a useless feature.

Yeah, I should have clarified - useless for use on remote servers, for the reasons you mention. :)

You don't have to install anything to do color switching, AFAIK. There are configuration options that you can use to match based on regexp, so you tell it when it sees '^root@hostname' it needs to change the background color and you are done.

It seems like you should be able to do that because it allows regex matching for other things, but to do profile switching, you must have shell integration installed.

https://iterm2.com/documentation-automatic-profile-switching...

Why not just do this in your personal shell theme? When I made my own when I got finally got serious about refreshing my ZSH environment years back, one of the first things I made sure to have was that a root shell was well highlighted with a bright red. You can build your prompt with a conditional %(!.true.false) for whether the shell is running with privileges, and/or different conditionals for whether the shell is a specific UID. Section 13.3 of the manual covers conditional substrings in prompts, and it makes for a pretty flexible foundation to add visual cues under various conditions.

This in turn leads to the core major issue I've always had with something like iTerm: ultimately it's a struggle to find much supplied by a higher level GUI application that I can't do and for that matter wouldn't much prefer to do purely within the shell. Of course, the given terminal does need to be capable of handling the basics, in terms of full color, UTF and all that, and there was a time where iTerm was well ahead of Terminal.app there. But I think since at least OS X 10.8 or so Terminal.app has been good enough that zsh/tmux etc can handle the rest, and the result is a setup that's a lot more flexible in terms of what systems it will work on and can be work on from. And that seems like a pretty valuable point of CLI in and of itself.

Stuff like the password manager actually does interest me as a stop-gap for servers where I'm unable to have proper shared keys, but a lot of what they list almost seem like anti-features, replicating (poorly or not) stuff better done within the environment in a non-portable way.

I was using iTerm2 while Vim was my main text editor. Recently I switched to Emacs, and now my iTerm2 usage is lower for 60%. It's lower to that point that I ask my self is it now worth over Terminal.app. I used it because it had True Colors, while Terminal.app didn't, and it was a deal breaker for me. Now I am considering ditching iTerm2 since I feel it is slower than stock terminal. Used it for years btw, worked great with my nvim/tmux/zsh setup. But now it is kinda all falling apart since I installed emacs.

One small thing not mentioned on this page is that iTerm2 v3 now supports 24bit colour.

If you're on the latest vim (install with: brew install --HEAD vim) you can use the same colour schemes designed for gVim in your terminal with :set guicolors

hmm, strange. I just tried it and no game. Installed latest vim like you mentioned. That sounds like a cool feature though

    set termguicolors

I would love to get more information on this. I'm not seeing `:set guicolors` as a valid option.

Hmm, are you sure you've got the latest version? Check for `+termtruecolor` when you run `vim --version`. Can you see something like that?

For reference I've got vim-7.4.1795 installed. Version string looks like this:

    VIM - Vi IMproved 7.4 (2013 Aug 10, compiled May  6 2016 11:18:41)

Also, if you're using tmux you'll need the latest version of that too.

Edit: Also, just remembered you might need to run brew update before brew install to get the latest installation formula.

It was all changed to termguicolors finally around 7.4.1809 . Example config:

    if has('termguicolors') && !has('gui_running')
       set termguicolors
    endif

:) Fantastic, that's the setting!

Hmm, I just installed vim-7.4.1868, so maybe they removed it again? The closest thing I have is `termguicolors`, which I believe was there before.

I (foolishly) did the update as prompted. Wasn't mentioned that it was a beta. Afterwards, I had to spend 1/2h trying (and failing) to get back to the look and feel I had before (all the fonts that I tried looked much thinner than before).

Eventually, I switched to a dark theme instead of light as I was accustomed. This solves part of the problem (my consoles are again reasonably readable), but I'm not sure I really prefer a dark theme over a light one.

I was surprised by this also. There's a new option for the thinner font. Under Profiles > Text, set "Use thin strokes for anti-aliased text" to Never.

I don't know if it made it into this version, but I was trying v3.0 nightly builds a few months ago, and the material-design-ish "tip of the day" dialog they added was… weird. It's completely out of place against the rest of the OS and I'm fairly certain it's done with a webview. Overall way too heavy and involved for such a small feature. A small native tool palette panel would have sufficed.

I reverted to the stable release for a while but these days I just use plain old Terminal.app. I miss the Visor/TotalTerminal/Quake pulldown feature since SIP kills TotalTerminal, but oh well.

If the "getting a notification when a long-running job finishes" part of the shell integration interests you, but you're not a Mac user or want notifications from a remote host, check out my side project http://ntfy.readthedocs.io/

Also gnome-terminal has this feature if you're on Linux.

I also wrote a command line pushbullet client. I have bash and fish functions that check the status of the last command and then push me a success or failure. Pretty straight forward and little overhead.

Oh nice—inline images, try this to see if it's working. :)

    curl dn.ht/lol.html

Can we please for the love of all that is good and holy have intelligent highlighting of IPv6 addresses???!?!?

When I double click on an IPv6 address it should highlight the whole thing. Bonus points if it also gets %dev for link-scoped addresses.

Add a colon to the "Characters considered part of word for selection" text box, under Preferences>General.

Thanks. Should be default though. Terribly annoying that this isn't default in all terminals by now.

That would break copy file name after a grep, as the separator : would be missed. Different use cases, different wishes...

urxvt allows full perl regex for matching text[1].

[1]: http://cvs.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/src/perl/selection?view=m...

IPv6 addresses have more than one : and have a certain format -- you can distinguish with a simple rule.

This tends to work well as a simple filter:

  ([0-9A-Fa-f]*:){2}[0-9A-Fa-f:.]*

Since switching to Debian almost exclusively I've found terminator to be the closest approximation to iTerm. That said, there are times I still miss iTerm but the decent split window support made it a decent transition.

I've gone back to terminal on osx. Better battery life and faster than iterm2. Only thing missing is split panes but real men use tmux

https://xkcd.com/378/

That's hilarious, never seen it before :)

Is there a way to toggle focus of terminal.app via hotkey?

Better battery life sounds nice, but I'd be lost without that feature. It's the main reason I use iTerm2 over terminal.

iTerm2 prompted the update for me, which I did. After that iTerm wouldn't launch anymore, manually downloading the 3.0.0. beta worked fine though.

FWIW the automatic update worked for me.

Same happened for me.

Worked for me as well.

I had the same issue. Downloading the beta works but doesn't like zsh

Did the update say it was a beta? All I registered was "3.0" and reflexively hit "update later".

A popup prompting you to switch from a stable release to a beta seems a bit strange to me.

I don't think it did, it just said 3.0.0. The website however correctly states it is beta.

Didn't work for me, but it may have been due to the fact I'm on a beta version of El Capitan as well. Reinstalling 2.1.4 worked fine.

I had to restart my computer. After that, iTerm launched fine.

It seems like the update hangs. I manually force quit "iTerm" in Activity Monitor, relaunched it and now it works without a hitch.

Love iTerm2, it has a ton of features I don't use but it also has ton of features that I need that are only in iTerm2, and that is what makes it great, it can serve a lot different needs for different users.

I'd suggest this be renamed 'v3.0' - the '.0' being significant for people like me who took a long time to realise, since "version 3" has been in beta for a while now as 2.9.x

Already posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11812488

[EDIT] Though, now I notice, with a misleading title...

Original story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11812488

The one thing I miss from Terminal.app is the proxy icon. I use it all the time to open a finder window (by right clicking on it)

I wish products like this were just name v2.3 instead of iTerm2 version 3... It's a bit confusing.

Recently had to move to windows/cygwin at work, iTerm2 is sorely missed

This works wonders for me : http://cmder.net

Having tried Cmder and others, my favourite was Babun [1] when stuck on Windows for work.

[1] https://babun.github.io/

Hm, by the looks of it, babun is just a preconfigured shell? In that case, I'd just hook babun into cmder. Cmder Is just a configurable shell host. I have a few types configured. Cygwin, powershell, powershell as admin, cmd, cmd as admin, and Far manager. You can have as many tabs as you want of any type of shell. Quite a different tool.

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