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I just want to say thank you to the maintainers and developers of iTerm. It’s one of the tools I use most on my Mac, alongside Emacs, VS Code (heresy!), Obsidian, and Keyboard Maestro. So, thank you!

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For those who have the funds and means, you can support the maintainer through their donation page here: https://iterm2.com/donate.html

Apple should fund some of the most popular open source tools used on their Macs. They have the funds, its good marketing, it makes business sense. Nothing speaks against it.

They should, especially any open source tooling directed at Swift. I don't understand why they're so slow at some things. Hell, make an open source foundation, I'm sure there's loads of tax write offs, I know Apple loves to save on taxes.

I don't think they're going to let you claim a donation to an open source developer as some sort of charitable donation, which means the tax write off would be no different here from any other business expense.

They're kinda sorta starting down this path, as they announced a new GitHub org (swiftlang) this week, which will eventually be the home of Swift and all its related libraries, including the rewritten Foundation. This should allow outside contributors direct commit access much more easily, and allows the language to start moving more out of Apple's control.

I don’t think I would enjoy my work if I didn’t have iTerm and Vim.

Does iTerm give you anything over vanilla Terminal? To my eye there's a subtle delay, it must be in the order of 50-100ms in iTerm rendering that's not present in Terminal. Non-scientific measurement - i'm just going by perceived latency and comparing to something i know is a 50ms delay.

That's for interactive use, startup time is slower for iTerm2 but i don't care about that because i basically never quit the terminal.

In both iTerm2 (when i used it) and Terminal, i have a colourscheme enabled and a custom font - both of which i'm assuming have potential to slow things down.

If you are getting 100ms delay with iTerm then something may be wrong with your setup.

I'm pretty sure everyone (at least on M1 macs) are getting that 50-100ms delay. There's a perceptible lag vs Terminal.app - in the grand scheme of things it means nothing. But once you notice it... you can't unsee it!

Do you have GPU rendering enabled in the advanced settings?

iTerm2 allows multiple sessions in the same window and lets you tile them however you want.

By sessions you mean tabs? The default one can do that too.

No, split-screen your tab any way you want, and have any font or any size in any part of your screen.

Iterm2’s remote tmux integration is a killer feature for me. Gives you a native, normal “windows and tabs” kind of feel, but for a remote connection. You can also disconnect/reconnect without losing your windows and tabs.

You don’t need to know any tmux to use it either (except for how to launch the right mode, which is easy to script).

If you spend a lot of time SSHed to other computers, I would highly recommend trying it out.

>> Iterm2’s remote tmux integration is a killer feature

But then i need to give up nested tmux on remotes https://github.com/craigjperry2/dotfiles/blob/main/dotfiles/... - it's super convenient to have tmux nested remotely for organising work and locally for broadcasting or just convenient context switching. Even when i was an iTerm2 user, i felt vanilla tmux was just way more comfortable (copy paste buffer for example)

iTerm has input broadcasting built-in (Cmd-Opt-I for "on", add Shift for "off"), and don't even get me started on the copy-paste: iTerm can copy multiple lines off your left pane without adding the contents of your right pane to the buffer. You can also have your left pane at 44 font size and your right pane at 8.

Terminal.app is definitely a little faster, but the appeal of iTerm 2 for me is better control over font, colors, and keyboard shortcuts. It also provides the ability to integrate the terminal with the shell much more deeply than Terminal.app, but I mostly don't use those features.

* Print IP addresses in green, MAC addresses in blue, the words "error" and "fail" in red, etc.

* Recognize something in the output that looks like a Jira ticket and add a link to that ticket

* Have your ssh passwords in one place and automatically enter them upon prompt

* Connect to many servers and type the same command into all of them

* Make your screen red when in superuser mode

* etc. etc. etc.

(Some years ago, I refused a company-issued ThinkPad Carbon and byod'ed a Mac because ThinkPad couldn't do iTerm2.)

Quake terminal.

I switched to WezTerm awhile ago for my main terminal emulator, a decision I've been happy with. But I keep a copy of iTerm running so I can pull down the Quake terminal. Main uses are running homebrew updates, and, perhaps ironically given the topic of this thread, sgpt.

You can save layouts (when I start iterm, it loads multiple windows on different monitors with split panes and tabs the way I like them).

More advanced search with regex support, more advanced paste (can do character encoding transformations, deal with special characters, etc), smarter and configurable text selection, autocomplete (mixed bag, TBH - I use zsh for that), more advanced snippets for repetitive commands, and triggers to notify you when things happen (long running commands finish, certain words pop up eg "error" or "compile done").

It has a basic integrated password manager that allows me to paste passwords I commonly use in the terminal with a keycombo.

It can more tightly integrate with the shell/program. You can select a point with the mouse in vim or the shell and the text cursor will go there, for example.

Some of these may have since poked their way into the built in terminal, but these are some of the main reasons I use iterm. If you spend a lot of time in the terminal, you can enhance your productivity.

I switched back to the build in terminal app a few years ago, because I don't feel like having my environment customized and live with the defaults for almost everything. The only thing I miss is having an easy way to switch between tabs in Terminal, you can do it cmd + <tab number>, but Terminal doesn't give you the number on each tab, so you have to count yourself if you more than four or five.

Seconded. @gnachman if you're reading this: thanks for making our terminal life actually good, and please ignore the haters.

Keyboard Maestro is also an absolute gem, and very reasonably priced.

I could write a 200 pages book about how you can use Keyboard Maestro to automate all kinds of tedious things on a Mac. Something that takes 2-20 steps to do: Create a macro in it, trigger it via shortcut or by name. Boom. I have hundreds of macros. From opening an app to fully automating processes that would take minutes to get done manually.

PS It can even record the keystrokes and play back.

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