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Comment by jakear | Hacker News Reader

I have found iTerm to have very bad performance relative to Terminal.app. I honestly have no clue why its so popular, I cannot stand it.

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For me it's about using tmux with the same commands as the native iTerm2 commands to split panes and other tasks. That way I can work on a server in the same way I work on my machine.

Metal based iTerm2 on a low power intel CPU is one thing which doesn't make me miss Linux terminal on MacOS. I've put up a dedicated display for it and functions seamlessly.

Please try to explain your performance issues, the author is active on HN and perhaps he could comment on it.

For me it’s only 1 feature: the profiles window. I configure them as ssh to hosts. And then I have a decal/text in the corner + a color in the bg. But most importantly is the favorites manager

I do this in my ssh config to get what I assume is the same effect with the iTerm badge.

  Host * !github.com
    LocalCommand printf '\e]7;file://%n/\a'
    PermitLocalCommand yes

I agree with you, or, I did, until they switched to the metal renderer. Now iTerm is as fast as terminal.app (provided you use the same settings)

So, in this case, why would I prefer iTerm over Terminal.app?

Seriously, I don't understand what the benefits are, if it's only "just as fast as Terminal.app".

It has quite a few nice features that Terminal doesn't have. But yeah, if you don't need those features then just use Terminal.

iTerm has very many features that are great for productivity which the default Terminal.app does not have.

Did you read the release notes for 3.3? How many of those features are supported by Terminal.app?

Speed is secondary. iTerm has much richer features, even the hotkeys are super nice.

But among those features is tmux integration and now python extension support.

I think that iTerm is prettier. The font rendering looks better to me.

It supports a 'quake mode', which is the only reason I use it.

Agree,I set the same key as in Quake,and full screen console drop down,which is very cool.

For me it is the Quake mode and triggers so I can turn output of the many tools I use into coloured and functioning URLs. (E.g. bug ids, pull requests and so on)

Tmux integration.

Is that really a nice feature? I live in tmux + iTerm, and have set up the integration but never really used/enjoyed is so I just disabled it. Not sure what I'm missing honestly

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