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Comment by jakear | Hacker News Reader

Agreed on using standard terminal. I’d like if someone could explain what utility they get out of iTerm (or any other non-builtin terminal).

I’ve found the performance of iTerm in particular to be far inferior to builtin, especially when the buffer grows large. iTerm even has a fixed buffer size by default and still has worse performance.

Alacritty is supposed to be fast, but then doesn’t support any scrolling, has a poor window resizing flow, and doesn’t have tabs. The suggestion is to use tmux for all that, but then Alacritty+tmux is slower than builtin.

- “performance” above means smoothness of scrolling and general “perceived performance” type things. Haven’t actually tried any real tests.

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Some features I just can't live without:

* tmux integration. Whether I'm in a remote server or my own machine, just use -CC and I can now use tmux with the same keybindings I would use without tmux.

* Watch for the completion of a command. Especially useful if you happen to be using a language with a slow compiler like Haskell or Rust. Plays a nice ding when the command is done. (This may require shell integration).

* Even if you forgot to run your command with time, iTerm can still tell you the wall clock time of your command. (Shell integration too).

And then just small things that the builtin Terminal doesn't have:

* focus follows mouse * smart selection (for example it could detect a URL and you can select the whole URL, then command-click to open) * copy on select

Just wanted to note: focus follows mouse is possible with Terminal.app with

    defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -bool true

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/98310/focus-follows-mous...

I'm pretty sure iTerm took its focus follows mouse implementation from Terminal.

It existed before I took it over but it has changes quite a bit since then, kinda maybe?

Regarding watching command completion, I built a tool for that purpose [1].

I use it mostly when working through SSH on the go and with slow connections.

[1] https://github.com/hoffa/pingu

To be fair, the shell itself can tell you the wall clock time. I have fish doing that for me on Terminal.app.

My favorite feature of iterm2 is that it can detect borders and confine the selection within them (e.g. only selecting one side of a tmux or vim split). This means I don’t have to bother figuring out how to synchronize the clipboards of OS X and various terminal apps, for most use cases.

The main iterm features I use extensively are split panes, broadcasting, and profiles.

CMD+O brings up the profile switcher, type the tag I want and hit enter.

Profiles let you configure cwd, commands to run (virtualenv activation), theme colours, and a bunch of other things.

My “prod” profile ssh’s into a management box, sets the background to pink, and puts a “PROD” badge in the top right corner.

> Agreed on using standard terminal. I’d like if someone could explain what utility they get out of iTerm (or any other non-builtin terminal).

For me it's simply that I couldn't get custom colors (e.g., the Solarized Dark theme) to display correctly with built-in Terminal. I haven't tried in 5+ years though -- maybe it's fixed now, and/or maybe I was doing something wrong at the time. But iTerm "just worked", and I never noticed performance issues so once I switched I never looked back. shrug

That is actually fixed now.

Cool, thanks -- maybe I'll give built-in Terminal another whirl at some point then.

Seems macOS Terminal app still hasn't True Color support. Tried running https://github.com/tclamb/iTerm2/blob/d0ecb297727a59c9ee5511... both in Terminal app and iTerm 2, and only iTerm 2 shows all colors, whereas Terminal app still shows only some colors. My VIM themes also look more bleak in the default Terminal app.

The ability to set a hotkey to toggle the terminal is a must. I assigned ± to it (i.e. pressing it will toggle the window).

>Alacritty is supposed to be fast, but then doesn’t support any scrolling, has a poor window resizing flow, and doesn’t have tabs. The suggestion is to use tmux for all that, but then Alacritty+tmux is slower than builtin.

Alacrity is just an experiment at the time.

The one feature I miss most in Terminal.app is smart selection and automatic copy on double-click.

For example, on double click the Terminal.app will select `path.txt` from `some/long/path.txt`. iTerm will select the whole thing and copy it to the clipboard.

I do too, kinda, but I use tmux to copy text from the terminal into the clipboard, and have for years. The muscle memory around that is so ingrained now that I only rarely found myself using iTerm’s smart selection.

It was nice, though.

For me it’s the split pane features. I know tmux and screen can do this, but I feel like it’s a better experience in iterm.

Things I love in iTerm include the following: * cmd-click on URLs or filenames to open them in my browser resp. editor -- even recognizes "FILENAME:LINE" to jump to the right line in my editor, which is super useful for errors printed by a compiler * changing the theme when using SSH and/or root, so I don't accidentally issue commands on the wrong machine or as root * split views * lots of other, often "small" features, which I can't think of right now but which I usually notice quickly if forced to use Terminal.app

for me the #1 thing is the non-standard full-screen behavior, which lets my hit cmd+return and instantly full-screen the window, without any animation or creating a second workspace.

You might be interested in spectacle. It's a light weight window manager for os x that will let you do that (and more) with any app.

https://www.spectacleapp.com/

I use spectacle extensively, that's why I enjoy iTerm' fullscreen feature so much :-)

Can't that be accomplished in any macOS terminal by redefining the application's keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences?

It's not about the shortcut, it's about the behavior. iTerm'a fullscreen behavior works fundamentally differently than the standard macOS fullscreen behavior (no animation, no dedicated space, etc). Much more like spectacle, but hiding the window chrome.

To get this, you need to uncheck "Native Full-screen" in preferences

Using non-standard interface elements and methods is the #1 way to get me to stop using a macOS product. Your program has to be pretty darned special for me to learn a whole new set of muscle memory movements for it.

Heck, I about dumped OS X when Apple changed the default application opening method. It used to be that when an application was loading and you switched to another window, the application opened behind what you were now working on. Or if you were working on something and another application in the background opened a window, you only got the jumping icon to let you know.

Today, applications can hijack focus pretty much whenever they want, aping one of Windows' most annoying UI features.

Don't worry, iTerm does native fullscreen by default.

My favourite feature of iTerm is broadcasting keyboard input to multiple windows. I use that when doing certain kinds of server maintenance.

tmux can do this too inside of regular terminal (where windows = panes)

I keep being told I must use iTerm2 and I have been. But I haven’t found anything it does that is better than the built in Terminal app. I’m going back to Terminal unless I find some reason to stick with it.

Not everyone needs the features iTerm provides. I used to use Terminal for a long time, but now I use iTerm because it gives me nice things like shell integration and notifications when jobs finish.

My main reason is very simple, there is a setting to allow resizing the widow by pixel instead of but character, which means I can make the window fill all the available space on my desktop

In my case, iTerm2 can do more sophisticated keyboard remapping than the standard terminal. Specifically: I have Caps Lock globally remapped to Command. Except, in iTerm, it acts as Control. Except, if I'm using some specific combos, like Cmd-Tab or Cmd-`; then it acts as Command again.

Oh wow, great idea! Now that I'm working more often with linux, I kinda got Caps+C etc. in my muscle memory, because I set Caps as Ctrl. When I switch back to macOS, it takes a while of wondering why my shortcuts won't work. Care to explain how exactly you set this up? I guess in System Preferences -> Keyboard you set Caps to Cmd. And then?

In iTerm Preferences, Keys, set Left Command to Control, then in the Key Mappings list, add each Cmd-xyz combo you want to preserve, and set its action to "Do Not Remap Modifiers".

I like Terminal, but a very specific feature of iTerm2 I wish Terminal had is using one of the option keys as meta, while letting you keep the other for typing characters like "@" on some non-english keyboards.

I’m a huge fan and every day user of tabs and split windows features in iTerm. Any performance hit for it for me has been negligible— save for one buggy update which was promptly fixed.

I use tmux coupled with that, btw.

Alacritty are developing a scrolling feature. Should land soon ish.

I use iTerm simply because the standard emacs keybindings don't work in Terminal. I'm sure there's some configuration somewhere that can fix that. But iTerm is properly configured out of box.

Do you mean the readline bindings (in bash shell) or do you mean when you run emacs?

I usually enable the readline style keybindings system wide (move character forward/backward, move word forward/backward) using a custom DefaultKeyBinding.dict — but then typically have to figure out workarounds for programmer type applications which try to resupply these shortcuts expecting the keys to be bound to random Unicode characters rather than already rebound to the actions ... as I recall — with my customization the keybindings don’t work by default in iterm2 and I had to go in and change something to get the correct behavior (fortunately there is an option). Many programmery type applications have the same issue (fortunately it’s mkstly possible to customize them all).

So it’s stjll possible to get the emacs keybindings at all text inswertion points systemwide — but it’s a hassle... In the glory days of OS X — pre 10.5, none of this was necessary — option-f option-b etc were just bound to the right thing by default rather than printing pointless Unicode characters ... I’m still annoyed by that change and by the fact that a bunch of complicated configurations are required to get the right behavior nowadays ...

I mean the readline bindings in the shell, but I just launched terminal to see which ones don't work, and they all appear to work now. So maybe that's been fixed. That's great it if works. I don't use any of iTerm's bells and whistles.

If you meant Meta keys doesn't work in Terminal.app, then the option is in Preferences → Profiles → (Choose your profile) → Keyboard → [/] Use Option as Meta key

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