iTerm2 v3.5.1 moves AI features into external plugin

Yeah, iTerm is a labour of love for the author, George Nachman, and people were acting like the ragebait-hateporn-parasocial crowd, swarming onto anything that promises a hearty 2-minute hate.

I have no idea how to solve that problem though, it's just part of our zeitgeist and I hope people get bored with it sooner rather than later.

I don't think the pushback was ridiculous.

The "opt-in" you're speaking of was leaving the API key textbox blank.

My understanding is that this being filled in with anything is enough to have iTerm potentially send commands to OpenAI. There are also many companies that reject any applications that integrate with 3p AI services, which iTerm would have been caught up with.

Once your labor of love is used by hundreds of thousands/millions of people, then it's not unreasonable to receive complaints when the maintainer makes an unpopular decision. Not everyone has time to fork and maintain their own copy.

Don’t confuse the vocal, insufferable minority with the silent majority (who either doesn’t care, mildly enjoys, or embraces AI features)

> what do you think normal people think?

They mostly don't.

The most common objections to AI that come from the dev community are: privacy; IP rights involved in training data (and how it fucks over individuals)

The general public almost exclusively judges the features that are handed to them in products based on their utility and not the above concerns, so they will always be less critical overall.

It’s abundantly clear from participating on the issue tracker that these weren’t “real developers” commenting. They were hateful people. The result of all this BS is a less secure implementation (separate plugin with weak IPC guarantees—I know first hand as I was one of the people trying to make sure that this new plugin direction had at least a modicum of security, despite disagreeing with the direction). No actual security or compliance people were outraged, because all their tooling is sufficient to properly manage iterm2 in regulated environments etc. etc. and no part of any security/IT professional’s or compliance officer’s security model depends on how many different binaries an application is split into. It was all hyperbolic misguided rage to the point of being harmful to the actual security posture of the app nonsense at its worst.

And still used despite all the claims of impending doom?

Well that's the gamble with OpenAI isn't it? There's some utility now but it's currently unclear when we'll hit a hard wall on what's realistically capable with the models (and their direct successors), and how many things OpenAI will be able to with them.

I don't think anyone knows for sure where that wall will actually be (including OpenAI themselves). While I don't actually think we'll get AGI any time soon from any company[1], if they did manage to fully crack it, then there's really no limit to how much they can actually do and how much money they can actually make.

I certainly don't think we've seen the end of the capabilities though, even in the near term; I think the GPT models have a lot of room to improve and I think that newer models for generative images and video and music and 3D models are going to get substantially better. How "profitable" that will be will depend on a bunch of variables (e.g. costs of GPUs/TPUs/something else, energy costs, potential regulatory hurdles, etc.).

[1] I don't really know what I'm talking about, I'm not a machine learning or AI expert, it's just a gut feeling I have.

One advantage is that you can define arbitrary margins for your terminal. Thus, you can make your terminal full-screen and write in vim with nice margins, instead of super-wide ones like in the default. Super-wide margins for text are ugly.

The one thing I miss in the normal Terminal app, coming from iTerm 2, is being able to cmd+click paths and open them.

I moved away from the Terminal because of lack of utf8 support, also I "needed" 24 bit color support - I was working on some silly 24b gradient progress bars at the time.

I've been a happy Kitty user for some years now. It requires a specific termcap, so foreign servers are a royal PITA, otherwise it is pretty nice.

Terminal.app is a solid piece of software, but it hasn't been updated in an age. It only supports 256 colors, where most terminals support truecolor. It's also a lot slower than other terminal software, as it doesn't do gpu rendering. And there are a number of extensions which are common in modern terminals, but are not supported in Terminal.app.

Granted, not everyone will notice or miss such features in their terminal.

I use the iTerm global shortcut a lot for bringing a terminal window down from the top of the screen on top of any fullscreened app.

Some things I like about iTerm:

  + Can open windows and tabs in a preset arrangement
  + Can choose from multiple arrangements across multiple displays
  + Tells me if there's a newline in what I'm about to paste
  + Exports its config to a JSON file in a place I choose
  + I can remove the tab close buttons to prevent a misclick (I'm clumsy)
  + I can change tab colours from a shell script
  + Multiple profiles
  + Text spacing both horizontal and vertical can be tweaked
  + I can log everything displayed and typed in my terminals, for later searching
  + I can disable cmd-clicking on URLs

OK that's enough procrasturbating for now

Hmm! Here are some things I like in iTerm2 :

- Drop down terminal like Yakuake

- Visual bell, can show me when something has finished running

- Great incremental search, with regex supported

- Instant Replay, to allow time travel through anything erased from the terminal (like TUI screen repaints)

- Global search through all open terminals

- Triggers can highlight particular text when outputted on any terminal when a regex is matched

If using the Toolbelt feature :

- Keep track of your paste history

- Allows the use of text snippets to save typing long commands on remote hosts where you can't define an alias

- Show running background jobs and send them signals

If using shell integration:

- Directory name picker based on frecency, which is useful for adding directory names when composing long commands or to jump to a directory when using Zsh (which lets you omit the 'cd' command).

- Hotkeys to jump back to the points of the commands entered, to avoid scrolling back through pages of console output to find the beginning of a command

`tmux -CC` integrated to the native tab splits and the buffer. That's the killer feature for me. No other terminal emulator has it, not on Mac, not on Linux.

> I would have told people to pound sand, personally, given the absolute vitriol sent his way.

Sounds like a great way to get even more vitriol, and continue to get it for years afterward. Every time you released a new version, there it’d resurface again. Sure, you could block some people on GitLab, but then you’d see it on social media or what have you.

Or you could just move it out to a plugin quickly (which is what happened, the beta for this version was out in a couple of days) and curtail the backlash.

Being angry at the people angry about you is not a practical solution if your goal is piece of mind.

It was never opt-in in the previous build. You had to explicitly enable and add the OpenAI API key.

Vocal minority of users was hostile to the idea of integrating so the developer switched to a separate plugin model.

Security theatre imho but understandable in some enterprises

it was never opt out! Even the previous version had AI as opt-in, you would have to turn it on and provide an API key. It was NOT on by default. Now even the code path is moved to an external component.

It's fair to say you're sick of it. I never even used the feature myself, but here's the thing: I never even saw it and wouldn't have known it existed if not for the backlash. I had to search through settings to find any evidence of it.

You say it's "shoehorning" on one hand, then "I can understand how a terminal might be able to benefit from AI" on another.

It didn't send anything off in the background (you don't need an AI feature to do that, BTW).

The backlash was completely unwarranted here, and I say that as someone who wouldn't bother using that feature at all.

I get that AI is overhyped, but calling it “trash” seems silly and hyperbolic. LLMs can do some pretty neat things if you understand their limitations.

This is not a productive way to engage with this issue.

Is it?

It seems as though the maintainer moved it into an external plugin because they were told, loud and long, that “shoving AI [there] [was] totally the wrong idea.”

It’s certainly an example of how public backlash can change the discourse, but it is not an example of why it was wrong to put AI there.