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Comment by karakanb | Hacker News Reader

Please forgive my ignorance: what do these terminal emulators do better than a basic terminal application, such as Terminal.app? My work with terminal is quite basic, I edit a few files, execute a few commands and sometimes cURL something. Terminal.app has some basic colors, has tabs, and works out of box without any visible performance issues for basic usage. What improvements would these emulators bring to my daily life?

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You may have better font rendering (anti-aliasing support on low-dpi screens), faster rendering and scrolling, better support for terminal attributes (crossed-out, overline, italic, etc). iTerm does a lot of optimizations so it can render and scroll faster (I volunteered to add a feature to it, and I dug a bit through the code).

For instance, iTerm supports italic, which Terminal.app doesn't. Gnome's terminal (vte, actually) does support overline (I volunteered adding it to iTerm, but I'm nowhere near close), which is handy for status lines, as well. I think there is one that takes ANSI codes seriously enough to support double-height and width.

To see what's missing, you can look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

For instance, iTerm supports italic, which Terminal.app doesn't

It does (just checked).

I believe it's only supported if the font has a defined italic version, and it's unable to generate italic from a regular face.

Which is a major no-no anyway, typographically speaking.

We are talking about terminals. Italics used to be drawn by skewing the pixel clock.

Sure but we have bitmap displays now. There’s no reason our tools can’t take advantage and adapt to the times.

True, but generating italics when they are not explicitly defined is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Terminal.app is orders of magnitude faster than iTerm, or any other alternative. As in: less than a second v 30 seconds for cat <big file>.

With the metal renderer?

> What improvements would these emulators bring to my daily life?

If you're a light user, probably not much.

I spend probably 2/3rds of my day at a command line, and iTerm has a ton of handy usability features that make life a little nicer. With kitchen-sink apps like this, everyone uses them differently, but things that make my life easier include:

- command-up arrow to scroll up by command - programmable appearance changing (using the server-side shell integration) to visually prompt me when I'm not my usual UID and to show machine names in the background of the window - Deeply customizable minor usability details, like the ability to copy-on-select, which I use all the time but some people hate

Nothing that is going to empower you do do things you can't now; rather just nice features that make address the quirky needs of heavy shell users.

https://www.iterm2.com/features.html

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