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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

I used iTerm for many years because it was so much better than Terminal.app.

At the suggestion of a coworker, I recently switched back to regular Terminal.app and it does everything I need, but with much less cpu/ram usage and 'feels' faster. This is one area where Apple has really done a good job in improving things.

As much as I love this alternative solution, I'm mot sure I'd go back to iTerm2 unless I had a specific need that Terminal didn't address.

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I can believe that and would try going back to Terminal.app if not for a killer feature of iTerm that everything else seems to lack.

The Hotkey Window a.k.a a Quake style dropdown transparent visor

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

It is surprisingly useful.

I used to use Growl until every web page I go to started asking to make notifications that just look like Growl notifications. I don't want anything that even remotely looks that interruptive, so these days I pass on both.

This visor thing, I hadn't seen before. As a user of clfswm on my Raspberry Pis, this is a feature I can go for when on my Mac desktop, since I've gotten used to having a terminal right there whenever I need it (which is pretty often).

I think the big selling feature of iTerm was the tmux integration, but I've never gotten around to trying that out.

Maybe I'm one of the few on HN that doesn't use tmux. I've tried it but found that I guess I'm not enough of a power user (despite having used terminals since the late 80's).

Combination of tabs and sometimes split windows is good enough for me.

Tmux is that just remote.

I reattach to my home tmux instance and suddenly i have my 20 tabs back.

I get it. Thanks. It is not a problem that I have.

If I had 20 tabs that I needed to be logged into, then I'd find a way to automate it all somehow (terraform) so that I didn't need to log into them at all. =) I run some crypto staking nodes entirely this way... works wonderfully.

So for me, 99% of my windows are just to my local machine.

dtach (http://dtach.sourceforge.net) is way simpler and more transparent than tmux.

No tabs or split screen?

Tmux is a much more robust solution for that

It definitely does have tabs.

As of Catalina, it can do both of those things. It may have been able to do both before, but I haven't checked in a while.

It can do both.

Tabs and split work just fine in my Terminal.app version (2.9.5). I'm not on Catalina yet.

iTerm is all about the features. For me, two useful ones are remapping of modifiers and being able to individually set left or right option to Meta/Esc+.

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