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Comment by vaylian | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for putting into words what I had suspected for so long. Apple is really good at identifying what the vast majority of people (aka normal users) want to do with their computer and then they optimize these workflows. But if you want to do something more exotic you are usually out of luck.

Talking to Apple enthusiasts is really tough. It's almost as you are speaking a different language. Of course, in the end of the day a computer is just a tool. They are happy with what they can do with their machine and I am happy with my machine. But they have a hard time understanding why I see their system as limiting.

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Many Mac users come from Linux and Windows (of course there are migrations in other directions too), most developers on MacOS also use Linux daily. So I'd wager most of them understand what you mean, but disagree.

Personally I like to tinker and personalise only a subset of tools I use to get things done (iTerm, tmux, vim...) and have good defaults on the rest.

Others, like myself, have done already enough tinkering during our university days and now rather focus on get stuff done.

Exactly. And you don't have to say this and sound arrogant.

Our lives, especially with that high work-load we still have to cope with, don't allow us to choose many things to do when not working.

If you have family with kids you loose every tiny bit of freedom to "waste your time" on tinkering and get easily annoyed when things just don't work out of the box.

I like the possibility to customize everything on linux but I also hate how the linux world can't provide the standardization and clarity I am used to from OSX.

How on earth is there still no terminal emulator like iTerm2 on linux????!

From linux I miss the possibility to customize everything on OSX. I hate it how Apple allways tries to lock me into it's golden cage and imposes it's way of thinking on me.

In 80% of times I can totally agree with the apple way but there is 20% when I could throw that MBP against the wall with full force.

Ok I didn't want to start some OSX vs. Linux debate here it's just an example to show the love-hate relationship to both.

It's great there is some effort put into connecting these worlds. The way our economy works is the reason we don't have the computers and OSes we really want to have and sadly only the open source world will change this.

  > How on earth is there still no terminal emulator like iTerm2 on linux????!

Genuinely curious: What does iTerm2 do better than any other terminal emulator on Linux?

It's probably because it has a lot of features that are not unique, but you won't find all of them in a single terminal emulator on Linux.

Example, I don't know about a terminal on linux that both works as a drop down terminal (quake-like) & supports inline images.

Or split screen & password manager.

For the split screen functionality, I’d recommend tmux or Terminator. If you try w3m on xterm, you’ll notice that inline images can work. Could someone enlighten me as to why inline images are useful in the first place?

Imagine something like Jupiter Notebooks as shell.

That was the REPL of non-UNIX graphical workstations of uore, and inline images was naturally part of it.

* The gap between Windows Manager and Terminal is not as wide as with most terminal emulators I know in the linux world (copy&paste, drag&drop, search-function, mouse support, easy (!) image rendering support out of the box...)

* User accessible features like the tmux integration (look at this: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html)

Just to mention a few advantages.

Of course most of the awesome apps like tmux just need you to learn a bunch of new commands but I can't imagine myself doing that a lot over my whole lifetime.

Some things I just want to use without a steep learning curve and apps like iTerm2 prove that this is possible.

I use the shell a lot since many years but I'm far from using it the way I could imagine it in the 21st century (the shell is still the superior interface for computers in my opinion but I'm afraid this topic didn't really get much attention & innovative approaches in the last decades).

One thing I have not found (admittedly I have not searched much) is to be able to detect patterns printed on screen and launch triggers. E.g.: if something prints on screen "created a job XXX" I can color this text blue and make it an URL pointing to example.com/XXX

Look for "Triggers" under the "Advanced" tab of your profile. You just need to enter a regex and specify an action.

You are talking about developers. I am talking about regular non-IT people. IT people know that they can just SSH into a Linux server or that they can run Linux in a VM or a container. Regular people don't know these things.

  > Personally I like to tinker and personalise only a subset
  > of tools I use to get things done (iTerm, tmux, vim...)
  > and have good defaults on the rest.

If these things are good enough out of the box for you, that's fine. But it also shows that you and me have different mindsets about what we expect from our digital work environments. If you spend a lot of time in front of computers, it is worthwhile to adapt the systems to your needs.

IT people need to spend more time with their non-IT moms. It really does ground you to reality more.

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