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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

I'm done with iTerm2.

This was a great terminal when it was basically Terminal.app + missing features but over the past years it has grown into the proveribal "Kitchen Sink" and now does SO MANY things that I just don't care about.

iTerm2 has become a huge app with many many knobs and levers and all kinds of functionality and integrations. I am not surprised at all that (security) bugs are found. More code, features, integrations means more potential for security issues.

I switched to Ghostty, yes which had a security issue last week!, but at least it is a pretty minimal app with so far no intent to meet iTerm2 in terms of functionality.

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> does SO MANY things that I just don't care about.

The integration of iTerm2 with Fish was so buggy that I needed to disable, then I lost some features like imgcat... These bugs persisted while they were introducing AI features that I really don't care (it's a terminal, why would we need AI???).

I think it's time for me to move on... I don't need too much, just something that works as good as Konsole does on Linux distros. The comments here (yours included) made me consider using Ghostty.

> These bugs persisted while they were introducing AI features that I really don't care (it's a terminal, why would we need AI???).

Many terminal programs, especially older ones, are known for having confusing or unintuitive interfaces, especially if you use them sparingly and you need to do something specific that can't immediately be gleaned from search results or from the man page.

I've personally found Claude to be tremendously helpful for these cases; I am now much more confident in my use of ffmpeg, as Claude can often zero-shot the invocation for my particular need, or give me the opportunity to follow up and narrow the details of the problem.

Given that, I'd happily welcome the iTerm2 integration, which I'm led to believe was optional, as I could readily specify the behaviour / action I want in natural language and have the AI produce the correct invocation without having to leave the terminal.

This could also be addressed through a CLI application to invoke a LLM (i.e. simonw's `llm`), but that's not as convenient as having the terminal itself insert the LLM's response for evaluation and execution.

> Many terminal programs, especially older ones, are known for having confusing or unintuitive interfaces, especially if you use them sparingly and you need to do something specific that can't immediately be gleaned from search results or from the man page.

When there is such a rich database of manual pages and q/a about these tools, I tend to blame the user rather than the tool when I hear it called "too complex".

Additionally, if you don't understand what the command is doing why are you about to execute it in your terminal?

> When there is such a rich database of manual pages and q/a about these tools, I tend to blame the user rather than the tool when I hear it called "too complex".

Strong disagree. The example they gave about ffmpeg is a great example. Let's say I'm a casual ffmpeg user that wants to wrangle some videos one way or another.

I don't have the time to dig through ffmpeg's manual with tons of different options and terms that I don't understand just to figure out, as a trivial example, how to convert an mp4 to an mp3 while maintaining the best quality possible. I have 0 interest in learning about media formats, codecs, etc. I just want the result. This is not unreasonable.

With ChatGPT/Claude/etc, this is an even more trivial task. Nothing wrong with that. I'm willing to take the (minimal) risk of running an ffmpeg command while taking a common sense glance at it. It won't destroy my existing file. Or I'll run it on a copy if I'm being paranoid. I'm not dumb enough to destroy my machine or get some malware by running an unfamiliar ffmpeg command I copy pasted.

My #1 usage for LLMs is bash/zsh commands. Shell syntax is miserable to say the least.

> When there is such a rich database of manual pages and q/a about these tools, I tend to blame the user rather than the tool when I hear it called "too complex".

Extensive documentation doesn't mean the interface is good. `tar` is probably one of the most documented commands of all time, but that hasn't stopped it from being the subject of an XKCD [0].

> Additionally, if you don't understand what the command is doing why are you about to execute it in your terminal?

I can look up what the LLM's generated, or assess it from looking at it. (Comprehension is not the same as production.)

In general, I can work without it, but I'm a lot happier with it: when I need to encode a video to x264 with an acceptable bitrate while burning in the embedded subtitles, downmixing to two audio channels, and boosting audio by 20%, I can just ask that, instead of looking at 7 SO/SE/man/wiki/random blog post tabs and synthesizing it myself. I can do that. It's not a good use of my time.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1168/

tried out ghostty but its still missing some key features like cmd+F for searching. sadly sticking with iterm for now

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