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.
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.
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.