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Comment by karolist | Hacker News Reader

I tried it for a few years a while back on macOS but it somehow felt off, I don't remember why, something to do with mouse selection. I went back to iTerm2 and that's that, you couldn't view images with feh and similar tools in macOS terminals for some reason so I had no reason to stay. Out of interest, why would I want anything faster than iTerm2 anyway? Never felt that my terminal is slow.

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The main problem with iTerm2 is that the configuration is not via plain text and so it's impossible to keep track of your config in git. (I did try the dynamic profiles feature for a couples of years, but it's not the same). I use alacritty now, but I'm sure wezterm etc are also great.

in Settings -> General -> Preferences is a checkbox labeled "Load preferences from a custom folder or URL. I have that checked and the configs are saved in a text file of plist format.

On Mac, I have yet to find anything that can top the combo of Apple Terminal with the now-defunct Visor/TotalTerminal[0] haxie. Apple Terminal meets my needs well enough and TotalTerminal’s implementation of quake-style dropdown was the smoothest I’ve encountered on any platform.

iTerm2 has a dropdown window that can be enabled, but it’s surprisingly much more janky than TotalTerminal’s was despite being a first-party feature instead of a hack.

[0]: https://totalterminal.binaryage.com/

Input and rendering latency are much better in Alacritty than iTerm. If you spend a lot of time editing large files in Vim it's certainly noticeable.

I've had the same issue with iTerm using neovim, rendering latency was just too much iTerm. However instead of Alacrity I've opted to use wezterm as it's nice to use Lua for both neovim and my terminal config.

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