Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

Never understood why people use iTerm. I know back in the day it was because of the lack of tabs in Terminal.app, but tabs were added long ago and tmux was always a better option for that kind of functionality anyway.

Genuinely curious because I feel like I'm missing something. I tried it again a while ago and still couldn't see anything I couldn't already do.

View on HN

Tons of features.

- Multiple profiles

- Logging of terminal output to files

- Regexp search

- Search marks matches in the scrollbar

- Quick jump between prompts — it knows where prompts are in the output, so you can quickly scroll to each position

- Window splitting

- Filtering — like find, but filters the window to only show matches

- Triggers: Do an action such as bouncing the app icon or playing a sound when a text string occurs)

- Status bar: Show the Git branch, current directory, etc. — better than custom prompts

- Preserves windows/tabs on restart/reboot, even current directory and window contents

- Cmd-Click to open files and URLs

I bet Terminal.app has gained some of these features over the years , but it certainly doesn't have have all of them.

There are a couple of things here making it worth me checking it out again, thanks :)

But yes you're right, most of these are in the Terminal+Tmux combo already.

Yes! Also:

- Minimal theme mode for a more simplified window appearance.

My Neovim color scheme doesn’t work on Terminal.app. That’s, literally, the only reason I chose iTerm.

I’m not sure if other terminals support this feature[0] because iTerm was the first one I discovered with it and I haven’t tested all of them yet, but I use it for the global, Quake-style[1] terminal that slides down from the top of my screen as an overlay on top of whatever I’m doing.

[0]: https://babbagefiles.xyz/quake-drop-down-terminal-history/

[1]: https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/18380429971797580...

> tmux was always a better option for that kind of functionality anyway

Not sure a lot of people would agree. Tmux is way less intuitive than tabs/split panes directly supported by the terminal emulator. Also tmux is dog slow compared to native tabs.

Less intuitive? Sure, but those who learn it tend to agree it's the better option. Not sure what "dog slow" means, but it's really fast for me, at least when using a fast terminal emulator.

As an example Alacritty+tmux feels wayyy slower than iTerm for tabs/splitting.

Tmux also comes with some limitations that make it annoying (to me) to use 100% of the time :

- scroll back is painful compared to native terminal emulator scrollback, so is mouse support

- rendering gets slowed down by tmux because it parses the output itself, the fastest terminal emulator with tmux will feel slower than iTerm without tmux

- some TUIs work badly in tmux, neovim for instance. I’ve also had issues with htop in the past

Tmux is a great tool, but I can’t conceive using it by default, it’s too janky for that.

iTerm split panes use such intuitive keybinds I find myself changing other software with similar functionality to match, e.g.

split pane vertical: cmd + D

split pane horizontal: cmd + shift + D

focus pane left: cmd + [

focus pane right: cmd + ]

Just gold standard imo. tmux is great software and very useful on remote machines but its keybinds don't come close.

For me, it's some very simple things. Like being able to set the alt behaviour separately for left/right alt (so I can have the meta behaviour while still being able to type funky characters)

I use it for `tmux -CC`.

Truecolor.

Already a deal breaker.

Can it split windows too and have some simple way to select the content?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com