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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

I have never felt a productivity roadblock from terminal. It’s important to distinguish “oh neat and shiny”/“I like this more” from “actually makes me work faster”. If your terminal is a real productivity roadblock, it’s likely your workflow is optimizing for the wrong things because it just shouldn’t be taking that much of your time.

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I work on a laptop with a small scren most of the time. I am constantly going in and out of the shell. iTerm2 has a quake mode that allows me to seamlessly pull this up on top with a keypress. It significantly reduces the lag of switching to another window with CMD+Tab or w/e.

Some of this stems from just the extremely bad support for hotkey window management on the part of MacOS.

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.

ghostty has a quick terminal too. you can also use raycast to toggle show/hide any app including third party terminals.

The small screen is your productivity bottleneck far more than the terminal itself. Change that and I’m sure you’ll notice a much larger productivity boost than a few seconds saved on cmd-tab or other hotkeys available (and there are hotkey improvement tools you can install that aren’t tied to a specific application).

I move around a lot and travel light, upgrading the small screen isn't really an option. I definitely agree there are probably countless ways I could further optimize my system, but switching to a more feature-rich shell app is a clear productivity upgrade, since it only took me a few minutes to setup the features I need (security concerns aside).

Bringing a mobile external monitor with me saved my life (figuratively).

Neovim is basically unusable due to the plugins I use having Unicode characters not supported properly (like telescope), so it does make a huge difference to me. Also, latency is an issue, and of the third-party terminals, only kitty is snappy enough to have nearly zero latency issues while typing. Drives me crazy when I’m chaining commands and there is a ~150ms delay.

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

You're right, all those users that switched to iterm2 because the default is such a steamer have NO IDEA what they are doing, and only you, some random on the internet are capable of seeing the flaw in their ways.

People can switch because certain things feel easier or there’s nicer polish or quality of life improvements you enjoy. That doesn’t mean there’s an actual productivity boost and couching the former in terms of the latter is dishonest.

It’s interesting the emotional reaction you’re having to a rather banal observation.

are you mental? terminal on os x used to be objectively shite, with horrendous latency. that is enough to discourage people for life.

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