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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

iTerm2[2] and I'm astonished there's less mention of it on this thread (though there is some).

That is mainly because I switched mostly to Linux a few years ago, and you'd think the lack of a good terminal app wouldn't be the biggest pain point of switching from Mac to Linux, but it absolutely is.

There's no terminal app on Linux even close to as good as iTerm2.

[2]: https://iterm2.com/ but it's v3 tho ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯

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I recommend that you try out WezTerm[1]. I used Warp before switching to WezTerm, but Warp took always a long time to open the first time. WezTerm on the other hand is extremely snappy and easy to configure. After having tried iTerm2, Alacritty, Kitty, Warp and others I might be forgetting, I don't think I'll ever move away from WezTerm. It just works.

[1]: https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/index.html

I've tried WezTerm, and it seemed good. But, I didn't see anything better that iTerm. (Aside from the name not being "WezTerm2" :-/ ) And even though I use only maybe 8% of iTems's features, that's still a significant number of great features no other terminal that I know of has.

I've also tried all the others you mention. I actually like Konsole from KDE the second best, I think.

But none of them come even close to iTerm, except... it doesn't run on my main computers, so I have to find a Mac and SSH into my main (Linux) machines.

What I want is iTerm (minus confusing version iTerm 2 v 3.x naming stuff), that work on Linux also. (Extremely unlikely to ever exist, I know... just stating my wants.)

And maybe also with a Termius-style "persist all your bookmarks and saved configs to the cloud so that with one commmand you have them all on any machine".

Seriously! I think I spend most of my time in iTerm over any other single app.

Plus, it's open source and the developer continues to improve it, so many years later.

Yeah. I realized it was so important when I noticed that my main daytime use of my Mac was to operate my Linux machine via iTerm2.

Like any time I need to do something complicated, like a process that I might want to document after the fact... iTerm never loses history, you can get timestamps on every command after the fact. It's automatable, you can easily tell it to open 10 terminals, replaying a different CLI command sequence in each... I could go on and on and on, but I can't think of any other example of an app that has so thoroughly dominated its category.

I mean maybe like Microsoft Excel for Windows, but that is from a whole other angle (that is not software excellence haha)...

I'm an iTerm user as well, but I hardly use any of its features -- I stick with it primarily because its font rendering is better than any other terminal I've tried on macOS. My needs are pretty minimal and aren't terminal-dependent, e.g. tmux, neovim...that's about it. I just need the terminal to display text, really.

What features from iTerm make you love it so much?

Also not GP.

I create profiles for starting up each part of my work tech stack (backend, frontend, workers, specific ssh connections, etc.) and I can run/switch to them in separate tabs via shift-cmd-o and typing a few characters of the name. Can also start up all of them at once via an 'Open All' command for a group of profiles.

I'm not GP, but tab splitting and tmux Control Codes integration are 2 of my main productivity features in any software.

I haven't found any other terminal emulator that has them. On Linux, Konsole has decent splitting but no `tmux -CC`.

I use terminator as a substitute for iterm. It's written in python and looking for your support. https://github.com/gnome-terminator/terminator

What makes it better than iTerm2?

I never said it's better. It's a replacement if you are looking for one.

The reason is that there was a recent controversy[0]. Many people have moved to alacritty/kitty/wezterm.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40432446

Huh, seems like one of those "Waffle House now offers CHOCOLATE syrup in addition to cheap maple-flavored syrup, NEVER EATING THERE AGIAN!!" kind of issues.

I noticed the AI feature in the latest update to iTerm2, but it wasn't turned on by default, and I didn't turn it on, so...

¯\\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯

Nailed it. I thought, “huh, interesting, won’t use it, next item…” and moved on. I was surprised at the firestorm.

Gell-Mann Amnesia effect but for software instead of journalism

Pretty ridiculous controversy. Opt-in feature, disabled until you paste your own OpenAI API key on it.

Not to mention that you need to interact with it every time you use it, sheesh.

The Mastodon mobs who brigaded the issue tracker were squarely in the fringe, frowned upon by pretty much everyone else...

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