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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

>> iTerm2 is the ultimate terminal emulator. It alone warrants the purchase of a Mac.

This is quite a strong statement and caught me a little off guard. What particular features does iterm2 offer that make it so stellar? I'm genuinely curious, as I haven't ever felt the burning need for a "better" terminal emulator on OSX (or Linux for that matter).

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From what I remember, the default terminal emulator on OSX does not even allow customising the color palette! I was able to only change the foreground and background color, and forced to stick to one of the predefined themes for the rest. On the other hand, I doubt iterm2 can achieve the flexibility and customisability of urxvt, which for me is still the #1 terminal emulator. Just my two cents to add to the discussion :)

> From what I remember, the default terminal emulator on OSX does not even allow customising the color palette!

For what it's worth, at least in Mountain Lion you can change the ANSI palette in Terminal.app. That said, it would never have occurred to me that this is something someone might want to do :).

Come on. The default "blue" color is ridiculously ugly. I always thought of it as a punishment for those who want to mess with OS X.

Compare that disgusting color palette with a sane one: https://github.com/pstadler/optometrist

I guess people don't know how to use google:

http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/21/add-color-to-the-terminal-in-...

While I don't agree that the default scheme is "disgusting", I have to admit that the alternative presented there is rather attractive.

Perhaps I'll give this a go for a while.

> From what I remember, the default terminal emulator on OSX does not even allow customising the color palette! I was able to only change the foreground and background color, and forced to stick to one of the predefined themes for the rest.

This certainly hasn't been true since at least 10.7, and I think for longer than that.

That's really not true: You can completely customize the terminal.app colors (background, foreground, cursor, selection highlight, ansi colors, etc.), the window transparency and blur-effect, both for active and inactive windows. You can save your customizations as themes.

http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/features

Looks to me like it just exposes many of the out-of-the-box Linux terminal features that aren't immediately obvious & require Googling to setup. But saying that it is so amazing it alone warrants ditching Linux and going Mac is a ridiculous statement that certainly wasn't intended to be taken at face value.

I'd love to see the run down on that as well. I spend 8-10 hours a day in Terminal.app, usually with 15-20 console tabs open, and I've certainly used iTerm2 for a few weeks, just to get a sense of what I'm missing - but I've always come back to Terminal.app.

I will agree, though, that the Terminal environment on the Macintosh singlehandedly causes me to use the OS X environment instead of windows - and this is after using SecureCRT/Putty for 6-7 years - so it's clearly not a case of "You love what you are used to."

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