I know it's largely personal preference but are there any strongly compelling reasons to use iTerm2 over stock Terminal on macOS in 2025? Despite recommendations, I've been wary of security and privacy issues much like this SSH bug.
Two more:
2) if you accidentally close a tab/window, you have a few seconds to hit ⌘z and the window will reappear as if you never closed it!
3) Minimum color contrast. If your terminal color scheme and what you're running's color scheme interact poorly to create something that would be unreadable, iterm notices and you can have it override those colors to be something of higher contrast, automatically.
But that's just my killer features. iTerm is like Word - it is a bloated monster with thousands of features. Nobody needs them all, but nobody agrees on which ones they need.
Designed to help environments that haven't reached 2010 era of automation of Salt or Chef.
It really is useful in the right scenarios, sure you shouldn't adopt it as your "official method for provisioning production servers" but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a legitimate use case or is a "crutch".
Every feature to one person can be a crutch to the next. Adding Salt or Chef to anything also increases the attack surface.
You probably don't need iTerm because the KDE (and the Gnome tbh) consoles are so much better than the built-ins that come with Mac and Windows.
And yeah I use Konsole, it's great! <3
MacOS wasn't so bad in the beginning, it used to be a Unix with good UI, but over the years Apple has been very busy replacing extensive settings with annoying on/off sliders (or nothing at all). Especially on macOS Server (if that's still a thing).
I also tried different macOS release notes [1][2][3][4], doing ctrl F "terminal" and could't find anything either.
Does anyone know where this is published? Is it not publicly available?
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...
[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/120283
- https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2008-0042
- https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2002-1898
- https://infocon.org/cons/Disobey/Disobey%202017/Mikko%20Kent... [video, I can't find a reference to that in Apple's release notes]
- There is also https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2018/q1/216 -- which led to a vague credit for Federico Bento in https://support.apple.com/en-ng/103758 proving they don't give everything CVEs (fine, but when the issue is public already it would be helpful to have a bit more detail).
I reported https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security#apple-terminal... to Apple ~2 years ago and they still haven't fixed it. It's not as serious as some vulnerabilities though and likely doesn't deserve a CVE, would be nice if they fixed it though.
(Finding this can be hard because Apple only link to release notes for currently supported versions, the pages are still around if you know the URL or you can find them via searches if they happen to be indexed still.)
I have heard a lot of great things about https://ghostty.org/ but haven't had a chance to check it out
edit: oops, I misread your question as "what alternatives are there"
His "style" compounds on that by making him seem untrustworthy.
For me, „just” being able to use a full-screen-mode-that-is-different-than-native-macOS-full-screen is worth it; but I imagine there are maybe like seven other people out there for whom it matters.
Thank you for reminding me why I should just return to iTerm! It might seem minor to some, but this is such an essential 'feature' that it probably overrides all other differences, for me.
One small question, though: are you aware of anything that 'native' full-screen does that 'bespoke' full-screen misses out on? Any disadvantages whatsoever?
So the move there is to install Rectangle.app (https://rectangleapp.com/), the successor to Spectacle, and then choose your terminal independently.
I want an actual-full-screen, with menu-bar and Dock invisible, with no window chrome - not merely “fill the maximum allowable space by the OS, as if dragging the windows corner with mouse”.
BUT I don’t want to use the native affordance for that, since that makes it its own “Desktop”, and I can no longer switch to it using my Snow Leopard-era muscle memory of using ^-<number> to switch between them.
I am fully aware that this is incredibly niche requirement, but it is a dealbreaker for me :)
I saw that Ghostty kinda supports this; but then disables tab support if this is enabled, which, also an obvious dealbreaker.
https://textual.textualize.io/FAQ/#why-doesnt-textual-look-g...
confirm-close-surface = false
macos-titlebar-style = tabs
theme = IR_BlackNo other terminal implements it AFAIK.
So, what magic am I using without realizing it?
i believe the session can even be shared with a normal tmux session.
I tried Ghostty for this but couldn't get the images to display as quickly or in full resolution, but it's very possible I was holding it wrong. I'd love to switch, honestly, if anyone has a recommendation for how to make it work as well as the iterm2-tools Python package.
I also use multi-pane mirroring for managing some machines at home that I haven't bothered making more automated.
I stopped using iterm after it did the chatgpt integration, which was a bridge too far for my tastes and landed on wezterm. All of the alternatives have nits.
But probably that's terrible advice for 99.8% of people out there, probably more like 99.998, or even more 9s.
It has far too much feature bloat though to the point that it's somewhat brittle, and I'd imagine there are many more lurking security issues
I'm sure there's a thousand others that do both of those things, but I adopted iTerm2 about 10 years ago, and it hasn't given me cause to investigate others.
I still prefer the blurred transparency of Terminal over the too transparent Windows Terminal, but that’s a matter of taste.
Well suited replacement for iterm2 and terminal.app, imo
Deniable ("popular app") increase in attack surface?
There's a setting under Profiles/Text in the Text section. It's the first checkbox. Does that work, or is there a bug?