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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

<rant>People worry too much about what they use to host text editors and terminal windows...</rant>

Slightly offtopic; I worry about Window managers... Too much, I admit but it's such a difference in productivity for me. Is there a good i3/ratpoison alternative for Mac OS X or Windows? I think I have tried all that came up with Google and they are far less efficient than both of the above.

I use Amathyst on Mac, having got used to AwesomeWM and then needing to switch. I believe its (unfamiliar to me) key bindings are based on i3.

https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Mentioned elsewhere, but KWM may be a little more to your liking and focus follows mouse: https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm

Amethyst has an experimental focus follows mouse. Does KWM handle modal dialogs a little better than Amethyst in that mode?

(I will also say that macOS's menu bar app buttons were not designed with focus follows mouse in mind!)

Thanks. I do not know that one. Installing now.

Sure, except that OSX's iterm2+Karabiner is so much better than any terminal on Linux. Awesome full-screen switching (⌘-Enter), easy shortcuts to create subwindows, natural clipboard support, great keyboard compatibility with Emacs (after futzing with keyboard settings and Karabiner mappings). On Ubuntu, all of these have been lacking. Hell, I can't even use the terminal for a single session without accidentally triggering the App Launcher several times.

If you like iTerm2 you might want to try a tiling window manager like dwm.

> Awesome full-screen switching (⌘-Enter), easy shortcuts to create subwindows, natural clipboard support, great keyboard compatibility with Emacs (after futzing with keyboard settings and Karabiner mappings).

Except for "natural clipboard support" (dunno what you mean) and "Emacs" (I am a vim user, so I set up vim shortcuts) I have everything you said in my i3 setup, however for every application instead only for terminal.

> "natural clipboard support" (dunno what you mean)

I'd assume the author means the same shortcuts as every other app, which would be Ctrl-C/V on Linux. Obviously that wouldn't work in the terminal emulator, but I don't see why you can't remap it to Meta-C/V (as MacOS uses) for that.

You could even remap it globally: http://askubuntu.com/questions/102846/remapping-keyboard-sho...

Terminology, the Enlightenment terminal is better than iterm2+Karabiner imo especially when you consider Karabiner doesn't properly work on Sierra.

Karabiner Elements + khd https://github.com/koekeishiya/khd replaced Karabiner for me on Sierra.

> Hell, I can't even use the terminal for a single session without accidentally triggering the App Launcher several times.

Pretty sure that has to do with you being used to different keyboard shortcuts, not with any inherent properties of the terminal app. I'm currently experiencing this the other way around (working on OS X being used to Ubuntu), and struggling with it as well.

I tried to disable it altogether, but couldn't.

I have to absolutely agree on iterm2, I'd love to have the same on Linux... there are a few okay ones, none I've tried as good. On windows, I like ConEmu okay, still not as good, but better than default.

Honest question. I spend my development time switching between OS X, Linux and Windows and I've been using iterm2 for years. Yet I have no idea why people claim that it is so much better than anything else out there. If I where to completely give up on OS X for Linux, iterm2 wouldn't even make the list of things I'd even consider missing. What unique killer features am I not using?

What's your editor? For me it's emacs (w/o X) so I"m inside iterm2 for the entirety of my Linux work.

clean, navigable UI is probably at the top... split and tab views is another huge one for me. I usually have my last desktop with iterm, and 3 windows open... one is running my project with a watcher, and the other two for various tasks.

The next screen is my editor, next browser, finally email/comms. ConEmu is OK on windows, and I've tried a few different linux terms, but not is as easy/nice to use by a mile.

I really like st, from the suckless guys. It does one thing — terminal emulation — and does it very well. For multiplexing there's always tmux or screen or whatever (I like tmux). st just runs, never crashes and is beautiful to boot.

For the feature set I'm using, iTerm2 and Konsole (KDE terminal app) are on par.

I may give Konsole a shot, though I don't think I'm running any Qt apps, so may have a lot of libraries to download.

Hear hear!!

"I’ve also run various Linux distributions and BSDs since around 2000, so am quite familiar with them"

Therefor i consider, it is not even a switch just more dedicated usage. Clickbait blogpost, if you ask me.

Honestly, if Linux's font rendering looked as good as OS X, I would have already switched. I know it might sound arbitrary, but aesthetics matter to me, and if I'm going to stare at it for 12 hours a day it should look nice. :)

I spend most of the time in terminals and text editors and, quite frankly, the only things favoring the Mac are the high-dpi built-in screen and the touchpad gestures. The only thing favoring Linux is the select-middle-click thing. Everything else is more or less the same.

Exactly. If you do a lot of work over terminals and ssh anyway, does it really matter?

Most likely (hopefully, if you have a big powerful workstation) you use at least some big fat desktop application such as XCode, Visual Studio, AutoCad, Photoshop, Chrome, Mathematica, Office, ...

Just pick an operating system that works well with your hardware and your big fat desktop applications. All that terminal stuff will likely run anyway.

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