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Comment by rmrfrmrf | Hacker News Reader

You could cut this list in half if you just used the free stuff already included in macOS. I still don't get the appeal of iTerm or Alfred.

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For me, a massive advantage of Alfred is the clipboard history. I know there are plenty of other clipboard managers, but I've tried them all, and Alfred's works the best for me.

Features I like:

* Ability to set upper-bound on individual size

* Ability to ignore clipboard CF_ types

* Ability to retain variable amounts of data by time

* Ignore certain apps' clipboards

* Filterable history search

* Short and long content previews

I also use iTerm, but that's mainly for the performance benefits and customizability - I could live without it vs Terminal.app.

Performance benefits of iTerm? Terminal.app has much less latency.

I felt the same about iTerm until I started using it, and still feel the same about Alfred (have it installed but reverted to using Spotlight instead).

iTerm's great for the features it has that the regular terminal doesn't. Fullscreen borderless, universal hotkey to reveal, more configurations for workspaces, and I much prefer the paneling/tabs setup with iTerm too.

I assume the same argument is used for why Alfred is good, but I've never really gotten into it. Anyone mind trying to sell me?

The extensibility of Alfred makes it a whole order of magnitude better than Spotlight. Check out the Alfred ecosystem over at packal.org. The Spotify and Github workflows are my most used shortcuts.

What Spotlight makes up for by being the out-of-the-box default option, it lacks in versatility due to Apple's walled-garden policy.

Aside from the awesome feature that lets you point to any folder for the config file (I keep it symlinked to my dotfiles), iTerm2 can go borderless, which I absolutely love (iterm2-nightly needed)! http://i.imgur.com/GENVtUJ.png

I think people switch over from Terminal to iTerm too quickly, without giving it a good shot. After using iTerm for a few years I switched back, since I realized it wasn't bringing me any value.

The main advantage that I get from iTerm is the Hotkey window, which allows me to open a terminal window that fills the top 40% of my screen by pressing CMD-`, and then hide it by pressing the same key. Because of it, I wind up being majorly more productive because I feel like it's easy to open up a terminal window instead of doing things the slow way in Finder.

I switched to iTerm because I can no longer use TotalTerminal to get my hotkey window. :(

two things from iterm I really use a ton are the cmd+tab number to jump to a specific tab instead of cycling, and the copy paste history

iTerm2 + 1Password + sudolikeaboss is an amazing workflow that I depend on on a regular basis.

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