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Comment by PittleyDunkin | Hacker News Reader

> The Terminal app feels essentially unchanged

Is this supposed to be a bad thing?! It's a rock-solid workhorse. If they changed it I would stop trusting macOS to be any better than the linux flavor of the month

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Good point, but:

* I'd prefer better font rendering

* I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier, maybe even with the mouse (!). Use case is, say, a long curl command and I press up-arrow to repeat it, but want to tweak something. So I press and hold left arrow and wait.

* Semi-transparent background was cool in the 2000s; these days everything is blurred like it's Vista (not a criticism, Windows does it too, it's just UI fashion.) A terminal background is a place where that might be genuinely useful.

* This may be the shell, but when I reboot and restart I get my Terminal tabs reopened to the same working directories, but the history is identical between all of them. I run different commands in different folders for different reasons, and I want to be able to press up-arrow to get back the last command(s) per tab.

I am far from a Terminal, shell, or anything related expert. There may be solutions to the above. But third party terminal apps exist so there must be a market for some problems & solutions.

The Terminal seems like one of those things that management declares to be “done” and then nobody touches it for a decade, until somebody notices that there’s enough user outcry for a big overhaul. That’s what happened on Windows, where the console rotted for decades until there was finally enough attention to justify the (actually very nice!) new Windows Terminal. Hopefully there will be, because Terminal.app is indeed lagging far behind iTerm and other alternatives now.

I’ve tried iTerm several times and have never been able to understand the appeal. The most interesting feature to me is the Visor-style dropdown terminal but that feature doesn’t work half as well as the Visor haxie for Terminal.app did, somehow.

> because Terminal.app is indeed lagging far behind iTerm and other alternatives now.

iTerm always struck me as slow and bloated. I think it's just a matter of taste.

> I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier

I believe basic gnu readline semantics are followed here, and most text editing fields elsewhere, with emacs keybindings - ctl-a for start of line, ctl-e for end, esc f for forward word, etc. “esc e” to open $EDITOR with the command line in a tmp file.

> * I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier, maybe even with the mouse (!). Use case is, say, a long curl command and I press up-arrow to repeat it, but want to tweak something. So I press and hold left arrow and wait.

Ctrl-A moves you to the beginning of the line (and Ctrl-E to the end of the line); Option-left-arrow moves you left by word, option-right-arrow right by word.

> I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier, maybe even with the mouse (!).

You can. Just hold down the option key and click wherever you want in the command.

What’s wrong with Terminal.app’s font rendering? Looks as good as any other mac app to my eyes, at least on HiDPI displays.

>I'd like to move the cursor backwards and forwards in long commands easier, maybe even with the mouse

In Terminal.app you may alt-click to make the cursor jump to where you’ve clicked. Besides, I use alt-arrows to jump between words: I don’t remember whether that’s out of the box, though. In any case, you may configure the relevant codes in the Keyboard section of the preferences.

iterm2 is so much better it's not even funny, but terminal is fine and don't recall it ever crashing on me, unlike wezterm, which I tried for a while, but without fail would lock up the terminal every couple of days to the point I'd have to kill the session. Luckily whatever I'm doing is usually running in tmux anyway.

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