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Comment by vosper | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure there are a lot of people reading HN who use iTerm2 every day. For me it's an essential tool.

If that's you, and you're not already a contributor to the continued development of this software, then today is a great day to start!

There's a Patreon, so for many people it'll be very easy to begin helping out:

https://www.patreon.com/gnachman/overview

(I have no affiliation with iTerm2 or it's author; I just want to encourage people to support important software)

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Definitely a ton of users. IMO though, I've just used the stock Terminal on macOS for the past 4 years or so. I don't see my self using any of the features iTerm2 brings to the table.

If you're proficient with tmux I'm not exactly sure what iTerm brings to the table.

Full screen without having to be a separate window, so cmd+tab works seamlessly. Toggleable transparency.

tmux buffer back scrolling is onerous and highlighting in split view with a mouse is the same.

Text selection in split view is my main issue with tmux.

Quick work around: there is a shortcut for hiding all other views .

Can tmux do focus-follows-mouse for selecting between panes? (Last time I looked into it this wasn't possible)

`set-option mouse on` allows you to select with a click.

Yes, but I strongly prefer for focus to follow the mouse

I thought it wouldn't be possible, but, after a quick googling, it seems it is.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7462850/mouse-movement-e...

Sounds like an interesting idea to implement. Have you dug into the tmux bug tracker to check if someone already tried?

Yup been using this mode for years as the default.

What do you need to do for focus to follow the mouse pointer's movement? It doesn't seem to work like that out of the box, and the only settings I've found require clicking.

Sorry I misunderstood. I actually do click each pane to change focus/context. It isn't mouse-over.

My bad.

Why would you use that over keyboard switching?

FFM is used when you have overlapping windows and want to focus a window without raising it.

Personal preference? I have always liked FFM, and while I like the keyboard for many things I find it much more awkward than the mouse for selecting among many (10+) terminals tiling the screen.

(I don't want overlapping windows for anything, never have, and am still sad I can't get OS-wide FFM on a mac.)

If you're proficient with shell I'm not sure what a GUI desktop brings to the table.

iTerm has lots of features and from what I see many have their own favorites. I don't like/use the tmux integration(prefer real tmux) but some do. This is what makes it great.

The essential ones for me are, remapping modifiers and setting the right or left Option key to Meta, Terminal.app only lets you set both or none to Meta.

I love the stock Terminal.app on macOS, but I love true color support much more, so iTerm2 is the one I use. Solarized looks so much better with true color support.

I had no idea George had a Patreon, definitely putting a few bucks there!

iTerm2 can copy selections to the system clipboard. That alone is worth the price of entry.

cat thing | pbcopy

or in vi, !pbcopy

I like pbcopy, but it doesn't work when ssh'd somewhere

Try https://github.com/skaji/remote-pbcopy-iterm2

Why is this always the stock type of response when someone mentions a thing they like?

People like helping people.

Also, GNU screen: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16111548/how-to-copy-the...

Wait, you can't do that with Terminal.app?

The point is to copy selections. You select a span of text, and it gets copied without needing to type Cmd-C.

I've opened 200+ panes across 3 monitors, broadcast to all of them to update a configuration and saved. That saved me a lot of time, either building automation or ssh-ing to all of them one by one.

I don't know an easy way to do it in Terminal.app

csshX can do something like this with Terminal.app

Sounds like something ansible would be perfect for

Just to add to the options from your other replies, check out dsh: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/en/man1/dsh.1.ht...

Thanks for posting this. Thanks to your post, I am now supporting the software I use every day.

Yeah I was surprised recently to find out that the whole thing is basically maintained by one person. Since it's an essential tool for me, I contributed a few minor improvements for some usability things that were irritating me. Thanks George!

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