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Comment by ezy | Hacker News Reader

iSSH is still better. Especially on an iPad, and most definitely if you use a bluetooth keyboard once in a while [1]

Furthermore, I don't understand how someone could even make the remark that an ssh client reminds them of linux, and mean it negatively. :-) I certainly don't want an the equivalent IOS SSH client to the one Apple makes for OSX -- Terminal is rather shitty.

[1] BT keyboards on ipads don't support CTRL as a modifier for all keys, you have to create a workaround. So far, iSSH is the only app I've seen that has done it (By using option and remapping).

EDIT: Ga! Read the wrong tab.. was responding to Prompt and Grubers comments on it (re: linux), but this link points to the actual app. Just clearing that up... sorry.

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As a happy user of Terminal, what's wrong with it? It's fast, it's simple, it supports multiple colour profiles, it can be customised like any other shell... What more do you want out of your terminals?

To choose a few obvious gaffes:

- no xterm mouse support (no, option-click is not the same)

- the utterly stupid default for PageUp/PageDown/Home/End, which is correct for OSX UI, but utterly wrong for terminals.

Less obvious (relavent to UI):

- No notification support

- No window splitting (yes, screen works, but, re: changing panes, see xterm mouse, above)

- inability to launch a particular named window group from the command line (if this is possible, please tell me how! :-))

...And much, much more! [1]

[1] :-) And I guess that's about it for the things that bugged me compared to, you know, the actual xterm.

I've got Home/Down working correctly in my Terminal.app, you've got to go into Preferences->Settings->Keyboard, then scroll down to find the "home" key, click "Edit", and set the action as "send string to shell", and enter "\001" as the string. Repeat for "end", using "\005" as the string.

Caveat - this is how my work laptop is setup, my personal one is set to "\033[H" and "\033[F" for home/end respectively, but it works as well and I don't remember how I set it up. I'm remembering having some issues with the prefs wanting to escape the backslashes so "\003[H" ended up as "\\003[H" or something like that...

For PageUp/PageDown I find that applying the shift key with them does the trick (at least in applications like vim/less). However you can probably apply a similar trick for them in the prefs.

The Control key (jumping word boundaries) works sometimes for me, sometimes not, haven't tracked that one down yet.

edit: by "correctly" for home/end I mean jumping to the beginning/end of a line.

Out of curiosity, what do you do in a terminal? I ask because I used Linux as my primary desktop for about 7 years before moving to OSX in '06, and since then I've been using Terminal somewhat exclusively (except for the occasional peek at iTerm). Granted, I use gnu screen, and aside from the occasional mutt or irssi these days, I don't use many "full screen" terminal apps other than vim.

Still, I'm genuinely curious because I know you're not the only one that finds Terminal lacking.

I was never really a fan of iTerm, but I do really like using my mouse in terminal applications, so I wrote a SIMBL plugin for Terminal that implements support for mouse tracking: [link redacted]

Also, I think a recent update added support for horizontally splitting windows (with cmd+D).

I do agree though, I think Apple could do a much better job with Terminal.

Page up moves the view one page up. Home moves the view to the top. Similar for page down and end. Seems right to me.

You can split windows vertically. Not horizontally.

Could you not use osascript to launch a window group from the command line?

iTerm was crashy for me. This is not acceptable, no matter the other features. I cannot recall ever crashing Terminal.app.

Indeed. Paired with gnu screen and some bash scripts Terminal is very nice.

I've got, for example, ctrl+a+t setup to trigger a script that opens a new screen tab, prompts for [user@]host:, starts up an ssh session to the host, renames the tab to host for easy reference.

I still use Terminal.app on a daily basis but here are some missing features:

- 256 color support (for your pretty emacs or vim)

- advanced bookmarks, with tagging

- send to multiple tabs

For 265 color support you can use this: https://github.com/timmfin/terminalcolours

Doesn't that just let you customize 16 colours to whatever you want? That's not real 256 colour support, is it?

Correct.

I love Terminal too. It's extremely fast at scrolling, and it is the only terminal emulator I know of that does the right thing when you resize the terminal (it reflows everything to the new width).

It's also knows if any programs are running inside the shell and changes the red "X" button in the top left corner accordingly. If the button is "X", you know you can close the terminal without losing any work. If a program is running (even suspended with CTRL-Z) Terminal changes the button to a circle to indicate that work would be lost if the window was closed.

I miss being able to copy paste by just selecting and pasting it with middle click, which iTerm does allow. Also OOTB it doesn't support fn + arrows for home, end so you have to use ctrl + a for home which is also used for screen. Tiny annoyances, I just happen to prefer iTerm.

Consider replacing C-a in screen with C-z by putting this in your .screenrc:

escape ^Zz

C-a interferes with command line editing and Emacs. C-z makes it a pain to background a process in screen, but if you're like me, you probably never do that, anyway.

Terminal (at least as of 10.6) allows you to select-to-copy/middle click paste within the same Terminal window. Not full blown support, but at least it's something.

Better how?

iSSH has more features (the port-forwarding alone will keep me using it), but Prompt seems to have the basic login-and-command-line functionality working far better than any other client I've used. (All IMO, of course.)

iSSH is great in my opinion. The UI works well and it even has X and VNC support.

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