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Comment by pama | Hacker News Reader

Iterm is better documented. Try finding how to pass Ctrl-Meta-key; better yet, throw in a shift as well. Setting up 24bit color, supporting italics, and allowing Emacs keystrokes to go through to the remote server at will is a quality of life improvement. I managed to be feature complete with iterm on macOS with minimal effort, but not with the default terminal, and there was no source code I could check to help me avoid trivial annoyances. Xterm/rxvt from xQuartz on Mac OS are easier to work with than the default Mac OS terminal, and feel closer to their behavior in Linux, but then you have some unneeded X window features and miss other trivial automation features like multiple tabs.

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iTerm2 is slower. It feels way jankier with nvim than Console, kitty or literally anything else. I do not believe anyone should be using iterm2, given their history of security issues. All of them leave me scratching my head as to why did anyone think that designing it the way they did is a good idea.

The idea that iTerm is noticeably slow is hilarious.

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.

But it is. Scrolling in neovim is noticably slower on iTerm2. This makes it cumbersome to use. Even if it doesn't prevent me from inputting the keystrokes any faster, if it is cumbersome to use, it will make me work slower.

An entire thread of neovim users generally saying that the performance is acceptable: https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/JOQL9e76fp

Just because something else is faster doesn’t mean that iTerm is slow. It’s all relative.

Sure, it is slow for me.

>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've used numerous terminal emulators on both macOS and Linux. I use Neovim daily. There is no noticeable difference in scrolling performance.

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.

There might be some tmux involved, yes. But the same tmux config works just fine with Kitty. Kitty also hasn't been leaking commands I've ran as DNS requests. Nor has it left my zsh history on a remote host. I don't care to investigate why iTerm2 works worse for me because I am satisfied enough with a solution that works. iTerm2 not working for me rhymes with my previous experiences with iTerm2 and its security issues.

That's uncalled for. Security issues are quickly fixed and released in iTerm2. The dev is responsive to feedback, even to hostile Mastodon trolls brigading the issue tracker [1].

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?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40657890

People are allowed to have preferences and dislike software.

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.

This over the top aggressive response to a bug in a passion FOSS project. That thing you just did is what I have issue with.

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.

What specifically is uncalled for? I disagree with the design choices made in iTerm2 and wish the best of luck to the developer(s) behind it. I am not wishing any harm, but I do have to say that the input latency is annoying and attempting to resolve words in command output to see if they are hostnames is a dubious technical solution. Am I not allowed to voice my opinion on this?

It was an oversight that was promptly fixed after the issue was raised. The dev created a post-mortem [1] and a wiki [2] describing the issue.

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

Sure, it was an oversight. I am glad the issue was resolved swiftly, and I think George Nachman managed the issue well. But it is the existence of the bugs discussed in this thread that make me feel like not using iTerm2. I do not understand how can one not use past events as arguments in favor of not using a piece of software. I'm more than certain that George Nachman is a great developer developing great software, and I am not saying otherwise. I will however not cede that I do not wish to use iTerm2 because of the existence of the dns lookup bug in the first place, combined with the high input latency - I will not use software just because someone has put a lot of effort in it - I have to feel good about using it too :)

Cyberpunk 2077 on a MacBook Air without breaking a sweat? At what resolution and framerate?

The plain M4 chip will run Cyberpunk 2077 at 30FPS 1080p. (Andrew Tsai on YouTube)

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.

At ultra settings? Even if, 30 fps at 1080p is not nearly “without breaking a sweat”. Also, the air will have trouble keeping that performance after a few minutes without a fan.

I love my MBP M4 Pro, but its gaming performance doesn’t reflect well what it’s capable of.

This is at High settings! And I haven’t even mentioned that the game is running via Crossover through multiple translation systems. That’s translating both Intel Windows to ARM Mac as well as translating the graphics APIs (DirectX or Vulkan to Metal).

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.

Latency during typing is a real issue, not sure what you find hilarious here.

I wanted to like kitty and tried it many times. It is subtle issues that break Emacs now and then, like breaking the display alignment for some zero-width joined emoji. Iterm2 on a MacBook is snappy for me. With remote work, the latency for me is mostly network delays of order a couple of ms per keystroke for the cabled Ethernet connection; mosh helps for the extreme cases, or when on WiFi (which often feels annoying without mosh), otherwise ssh -C is sufficient for my daily driver.

I don’t know about the rest, but I’m sure Terminal supports italic.

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