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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

Do you use Windows? Have you ever opened its terminal? Congrats, you're using a terminal that you agreed can phone home with telemtry. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-terminal/9n0dx20hk... and the link to the privacy policy for windows terminal http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=521839

I suspect OSX is no different and has similar telemetry and privacy policy for its terminal.

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Nope. I have never used Windows on any of my personal machines, not ever. I am waiting this MS Windows thing out, you could say.

At work I have used it in some cases when not given the choice.

If some company I am working for is fine with the Windows CLIs telemetry, then I suppose it is up to them, although I'd argue against it.

In an (absurd-ish) defense of macOS, I don't believe anyone really uses the built-in Terminal and grabs an alternative (often iTerm2).

There's also the rumor that Terminal in macOS has had a handful of developers working on it, at best, over the years. I would bet money that Apple doesn't care enough about it to bother with telemetry and/or privacy policies for it.

Yes, they never substantially upgraded it once it hit 1.0 about two decades ago.

I bet that's true. MacOS terminal is basically still the one from next step. They've kept it up to date with changes like GUI toolkits and added a few minor things like tabs. But that's about it.

Fwiw I never bothered with iTerm, Terminal is good enough for me. It even supports some old school vt100 stuff like double width and height fonts. It's one of the better vt100 compatible ones.

It’s the only terminal I use on macOS. It’s a really “gets out of your way” piece of software. And super closed source.

I used iTerm from 2010-2018, but then I saw a respected colleague not using iTerm, so I decided to try out the Terminal.app bundled with macOS. It actually works fine, the only difference is that it never gets slow and is available on ever mac machine.

I have been using the built-in macOS terminal every day for years now.

I still find macOS Terminal to be noticeably faster than item. At displaying my keyboard input and shell output. It lacks other features, namely split windows, that move me to iTerm, but I do like how fast Terminal is.

> There's also the rumor that Terminal in macOS has had a handful of developers working on it, at best, over the years.

This but every app on the mac that isn't Safari.

>This but every app on the mac that isn't Safari.

Eh, I know it's a joke but there are full teams who work on Pages/Numbers/etc.

i have been using the macOS Terminal since macOS X was a thing (with different capitalization) and since its origins in NeXTstep since around 1990.

I suspect it's the same codebase, but don't have a proof of that.

I have been an OS X user since its inception, and have only ever used the built in terminal. I spend a ton of time in the terminal and I have never felt the need to use anything else.

Nothing wrong with the macOS stock terminal too. GP just pulled the macOS terminal telemetry nonsense out of thin air.

I too use iTerm for its rich features, but the stock terminal is known to have lower latency [1] so some people might prefer that.

[1]: https://danluu.com/term-latency/

Exactly, that's why people tend not to choose Windows for development unless they're forced to.

edit: use -> choose

This is so far from truth it's hilarious.

> Exactly, that's why people tend not to choose Windows for development unless they're forced to.

In my experience, most people who are developing software for Windows choose to use it to develop that software. There are a great many people who choose to develop software for Windows.

Well, that's obvious. If I had to develop software for windows (or OSX) then I'd be using those platforms to build/test those tools.

But I choose not to.

> I suspect OSX is no different and has similar telemetry and privacy policy for its terminal

wrong, Apple isn't Microsoft

No. I don't use Windows. Or OS X.

> Do you use Windows?

Whenever I do that, I can never decide whether it's me who's using Windows or Windows that's using me :-(

> forgets linux exists

Would you expect anything less than a product from the first company to lie down for the NSA?

Note that this is Windows Terminal, not the default terminal that actually ships with Windows (unless that has changed in Windows 11?)

But Windows Terminal is open-source and probably someday community will fork it to remove telemetry the way they did with VSCode.

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