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Comment by 0xakhil | Hacker News Reader

For a person who is comfortable with Tmux, is there any significant benefit that iTerm offers over the Terminal.app? I believe Terminal.app is better than other consoles when it comes to power consumption.

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For sure. iTerm makes tmux feel more native by, for example, giving tmux panes their own native tab: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html

I also see little benefit over Terminal.app. Plus Terminal.app has much better performance with infinite scroll back, especially when dumping large streams

If you like tmux, you should try the tmux integration feature in iTerm. It makes tmux windows native windows, and tmux panes native panes.

And what's the advantage of a native pane over a tmux pane? Could you clarify?

Being able to copy and paste using the OS native cursor over multiple lines, for one.

That's possible in tmux, though

not on remote sessions with local clipboard

Clipper makes that possible (shameless plug).

https://github.com/wincent/clipper

How much stuff does one need to keep adding just to make it work like iTerm does already?

Is it possible to copy and scroll over multiple pages using mouse in tmux?

Being able to use native macOS shortcuts like Command-` to move between windows. Native copy–paste. Focus-follow-mouse behavior for panes. Or just the ability to see multiple tmux windows (not panes) at once. And perhaps most importantly, the tmux windows actually look any any other window on macOS.

Huh, all those are features of tmux itself. I can copy/paste to/from system clipboard, I can easily movie between windows (and could set in my tmux.conf to use Command-` if I wanted), I can focus panes with the mouse, etc.

> Native copy–paste

This was a big one for me. Cut/Paste between applications and whatever is running in the terminal with tmux can be a real pain. Not so much with iTerm. And the consistency goes a long ways when you're trying to get stuff done.

The major advantage is performance. With tmux, high volume output from a single pane makes the whole session unresponsive, because it locks up the pty that tmux is running on. Native panes, on the other hand, don't have such a problem because it operates on different ptys.

A big advantage of tmux for me is consistent keyboard shortcuts across OSs. I really like iTerm but never use the native windows feature because you loose that as far as I know. Once you’re using iterm integration you’re back to macOS shortcuts.

I must be confused. From your description I thought you were not describing my setup. Then I opened iTerm Preferences and saw that Native Windows are in fact turned on. I must have been doing it this way for a while, and I can't remember what the functionality looks like when it's toggled to "Native Tabs in a New Window."

For me it's the little things like being able to hide all window chrome (and there are a lot of little things...)

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