You forgot f) so lacking in features that it's a productivity roadblock
I installed iTerm2 on my work Mac because it came so highly recommended, but I honestly never remember to open it over the regular terminal. ~All of the features that matter to me in a terminal are features of the shell and the OS, not of the emulator itself.
If you buy a base model grandma level MacBook Air it can play Cyberpunk 2077 without breaking a sweat and somehow terminal performance is an issue.
And if all I cared about was raw performance I’d be using vim instead of VSCode. But raw performance isn’t what makes me productive.
Additionally, there are so many ways scrolling can slow down in Neovim (e.g., bad tmux config). It's hard to take your word for it that the issue lies in iTerm2 in the absence of any sort of reproducible evidence.
Please don't be like that.
Also, any serious software has its own share of problems. Have you actually looked at the issue tracker for your supposed champion?
Seriously, give the poor dev a rest. It's absolutely uncalled for to throw in a non-sequitur about some bug from 7 years ago, making snide remarks about how that's a "design choice."
[1]: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/6068#note_409052...
[2]: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/wikis/dnslookupissue
Similarly, if your mechanic forgets to tighten the lug nuts or leaves the oil cap off, and nearly kills you or destroys the engine, you are allowed to find a new mechanic without the Hackernews hoi polloi coming out of the woodwork saying how unfair it is, he has mouths to feed, and linking to critical Yelp reviews of your new mechanic trying to convince you of your own idiocy and wrongdoing.
This emotional attachment to a piece of throwaway software here is frankly weird.
People are allowed to have opinions. In the same spirit, others are allowed to call out inappropriate or toxic behavior.
Also,
> Hackernews hoi polloi coming out of the woodwork saying how ... he has mouths to feed
Do you not understand what people mean when they say iTerm2 is free and open source software developed in a single person's spare time, and people aren't owed any of it? You didn't pay your metaphorical mechanic. Such bold sense of entitlement.
What's even more unfortunate is your take on my previous comment:
> linking to critical Yelp reviews of your new mechanic
Let me be more clear. You'll find something to pick on in any FOSS software. When you bring it up, no FOSS community will tolerate the kind of attitude you put on full display here.
Last but not least,
> This emotional attachment to a piece of throwaway software here is frankly weird.
Piece of throwaway software? Do words have no meaning to you? This is 15 year's worth of work that you're belittling. That work consists not only of coding, but coordinating with users and other software projects. I've seen him many times in issue trackers of various other projects. He's giving away all of that work for free. Imagine having to deal with people like you on top of all that.
Just because something else is faster doesn’t mean that iTerm is slow. It’s all relative.
If you are thinking about a change, console marketing would be a good place to start ;)
I did neglect the fact that Apple hasn’t thrown that chip in the Air yet, but I’m sure that’s only a few months away.
I love my MBP M4 Pro, but its gaming performance doesn’t reflect well what it’s capable of.
The cyberpunk native Mac release comes out this year and will almost certainly improve performance further.
Why would anyone care about ultra settings on a laptop? I don’t even set my PC desktop to ultra settings in the game and I have a current generation mid-high end GPU. Setting demanding games to Ultra just giving up FPS to not tell the difference.
30fps 1080p is basically console-level standards for a AAA graphically intense game (not esports or online shooter). And that isn’t bad at all for the processor with integrated graphics that Apple sticks in its cheapest computer and its tablets.
Your MacBook Pro M4 Pro is one of the best gaming laptops on the market in terms of hardware! Especially if you want something that’s thin, light, and quiet with good battery life and not just a thick tank of a system or a loud but thin and light gaming laptop that struggles to power and cool its dGPU.
Depending on your configuration, you can actually play Cyberpunk at high settings at or above 60FPS on your laptop. You’re vastly underestimating it!
Your laptop just needs the software to get ported, and the Mac gaming space is rapidly evolving now that Apple is paying attention to it.
There's very little I want in a terminal emulator. What I really want is a full screen terminal, with no menu bar, no delay, and no animations, which I can toggle with a global hotkey.
I just have my tiling window manager configured with a keybinding to raise my terminal. No menu bar, no delay, no animation, just type the keybinding and bam, there’s my console, covering the complete screen. Another keybinding, and there’s my browser. Another keybinding, and there’s my editor.
I don’t — I use Linux on my desktop. I stopped using macOS back when it was called System 8 or 9!
I think any tiling window manager can be configured to do this, but in my case I use StumpWM.
(defcommand terminal () ()
(run-or-raise "urxvt" '(:instance "urxvt")))
(define-key *top-map* (kbd "s-t") "terminal")
From others’ comments, I think that this is probably possible with a modern Mac, too, but I find that Linux is generally easier.
StumpWM: https://stumpwm.github.io/
It’s certainly not perfect, but I do prefer it. But then, I enjoy yak shaving grin
As my username would suggest, so do I. However…
> a better window manager
The bulk of my workflow involves Chrome and tmux inside my always available full screen terminal. I haven't the need for multiplexing anywhere except the terminal.
> better compatibility with server operating systems
I run nix-darwin on MacOS, and I have remote NixOS machines configured as build hosts. This is important, as everything I write is Haskell, and it must be compiled for x86_64-linux.
> a bash updated this decade
I use zsh and the bash available in the latest nixpkgs.
---
MacOS does an excellent job of managing all the other quality of life stuff that doesn't immediately concern me as a power user. A number of my current and former colleagues are all in on NixOS, but the number of times over the years I've had to wait at the beginning of a video chat for them to configure their audio settings, which sometimes means installing different drivers and/or turning their machine off and on again…
Yeah. Even as a huge nerd, I think MacOS is great.
By default, the way MacOS does full-screen windows is by moving them to a space. Switching between the terminal and another application, e.g., Chrome, causes a large sliding animation between applications, which I absolutely do not want.
On my Linux machine with KDE I can open a new terminal with a single hotkey and alternate between open terminals with a second hotkey. I've never once wished for a fancier terminal than KDE's default.
Using Mac for work is a different story, though it's remedied somewhat with Rectangle and similar.
Plus, any terminal other than kitty is noticeably laggy when using other terminal programs and typing quickly, and 90%+ of my time is spent in the terminal: using custom commands and aliases, ruby shell, docker, on top of usually using vim for editing. And having great customizable hotkeys for different common functions.
Guess my point is that the terminal app you use can make a big productivity difference
It’s interesting the emotional reaction you’re having to a rather banal observation.
After my "UNIX is cool, lets configure everything" phase, which lags behind in the 1990's decade, xterm or anything like it, is more than enough.
I don't need fancy stuff for a bunch of CLI commands.
It’s also a very popular corporate deployments where most of your command line users are web application developers who are just doing a job because it pays good money. They have no philosophical attachment to traditionalist simplicity, perhaps compassion nonfor computing at all.
I don’t blame macOS users for liking the features of iTerm2.
Wtf man. Some of the smartest people I know have no interest in getting anywhere close to sw eng or working anywhere in IT, so are by definition "consumers".
Just wait until one of those "morons" operates a tumor out of your brain.
The more serious point is that Apple's primary customer base does not care for what's going on with the command line, and that's why the provided terminal is basic and feature-bare.
It's not really this intentional thing where the bare terminal is the best implementation. It's more of a Notepad.exe situation where Apple has to include one for the basic functionality of the system.
macOS users of Apple and NeXTSTEP culture linage don't care iTerm2 exists at all, only Linux and BSD refugees.
Most would only get it via MPW, and outside automating compiler workflows, hardly open the terminal.
People on classic Mac weren’t making web apps running on Linux servers.
Also many of those people, if they want to deploy on Linux servers, they would be better off using local Linux development, not OS X.
An example: I love everything about the Things task management app so much that I would never choose to run a desktop OS it doesn't run on.