Hacker News Reader

Comment by puls | Hacker News Reader

Why do people keep suggesting iTerm2? The built-in terminal app on the Mac does Unicode and 256 colors just fine.

Historical. Terminal has improved greatly since Leopard/SL

Split panes is pretty much the main reason I need iTerm2. That, combined with system-wide hotkey toggling (which I used to get on Terminal with Visor), and Send Commands to All Sessions mode (cmd-ctrl-i, I think) makes me a happy command liner.

It's the little things which makes me use iTerm2

- easier to change the default darkblue to be readable on black - can configure double-click on filename behaviour (cmd+alt click in Terminal) - can have auto-copy-to-clipboard on selection

In short, it's more like terminal applications on other OSes I'm familiar with.

iTerm2 has few other fancy features, like horizontal and vertical splitting or Guake-like top-down terminal [0].

[0] http://ivanvillareal.com/osx/setup-iterm2-to-behave-like-gua...

I've used visor/simbl in leopard and snow leopard for years to get the top-down effect in terminal: http://visor.binaryage.com/

Multi-pane input via cmd-shift-i, and saved pane/window configurations through cmd-shift-s and cmd-shift-r also come in handy.

I personally enjoy being able to split panes vertically with iTerm2

Indeed. iTerm2 has replaced tmux for me for local development.

Why not both? http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration

iTerm2 can intelligently communicate with tmux in order to present splits and windows are handled by iTerm2, rather than within the single terminal window.

iTerm2 has an absolutely amazing history playback, amongst other nice features.

Am I the only one who doesn't like iTerm 2 because it feels slow to use? Example: Open up a file in vim, then scroll up and down quickly. The refresh on iTerm 2 is noticeably sluggish compared to Terminal.app.

The "step back in time" feature is sort of gimmicky, but does mean you can rewind even Curses terminal applications. Rarely actually useful, but it has saved me a huge amount of hassle a few times.

Vim also has history via the undo-branches feature. e.g. ":earlier 15m" to go back 15 minutes.

And the Gundo plugin extends that even more with a history graph and preview pane that shows diffs. A must-have plugin for me.

iterm2 supports mouse input, terminal.app does not.

Using a mouse? In Vim?

In terminal.

Why for?

Here are few things how I use it:

- scrolling with a mouse wheel

- selecting/resizing a split window

- jumping to a specific place in the code

- making a selection

All of that can be done much more efficiently without the mouse:

- scrolling with a mouse wheel

    :h scroll.txt

- selecting/resizing a split window

    :h window-resize
    :h window-move-cursor

- jumping to a specific place in the code

    /foo<CR>

or the myriad of cool things in

    :h motion.txt

- making a selection

    v{motion}

> All of that can be done much more efficiently without the mouse:

Surely we don't need to get into this sort of thing here.

If you don't know how to do it without the mouse, then it's more efficient to do it with the mouse. If you don't remember how to do it without the mouse, then it's more efficient to do it with the mouse. If you just like using the mouse better, then ….

Anyway, and perhaps more importantly, it doesn't hurt any of us if anyone else values ease of use (even if it's illusory or temporary!) over efficiency.

It doesn't hurt these "anyone" to be pointed at better ways to do what they do.

There is no "better", young padawan.

Yes, there is. "Best" is a harder subject to tackle, but there's always "better".

di{ is obviously both quicker and more precise than reaching to the mouse, pointing at the beginning of the code block, extending the selection until the end of the code block and hitting backspace.

One may think these keybindings are awkward or hard to remember (I did, at first, they are not) but they are both faster, more efficient and more deterministic by nature. But I may be a control freak. :-)

It's a subjective experience. I, too, prefer to use the keyboard as much as possible but I've also encountered doofuses that mock that position because the mouse is "so convenient" and "there's no way it's faster to use the keyboard entirely". So I guess their better is different from my better.

Good luck beaming your vim registers from a remote vim into the local clipboard.

That's why I prefer to use my local Vim (Emacs with evil-mode) and its remote editing features (Tramp).

I agree on most points, but there is no way that wacking Ctrl-W +/-/>/< is more pleasant than just moving either your index finger or your thumb a half an inch to use a trackpoint or trackpad and instantly get the window proportions you want.

You can of course make nicer mappings, but even then it isn't as nice.

All these commands take a count:

    10<C-w>

But I tend to keep windows at equal width anyway.

I don't count columns, I resize to taste.

I also resize often, particularly when using vimdiff, because I often use smaller screens (either because I am watching other things in tmux panes at the same time, or because I am working on my eeepc).

bam

  "narrower window
  map - <C-W><
  "wider window
  map + <C-W>>
  "shorter window
  map _ <C-W>-
  "taller window
  map = <C-W>+

>All of that can be done much more efficiently without the mouse

No. All this can be made with an extra cognitive overload provided by the use of keyboard shortcuts that makes you think you're doing something useful and/or faster than with the mouse.

Especially if you don't need to have your hand at the keyboard at all times (i.e you're just browsing code and not writing), scrolling with the mouse is way faster.

Keyboard shortcuts give me precision and efficiency, not speed, and that cognitive overload you talk about is a small price to pay.

For you. But you don't get to make that decision for everyone else. Stop trying to impose your value system on others. It's clear you don't like using a mouse. Then don't. Keep using a 1970s keyboard if it suits you. Bon a petite.

Yes, openly criticizing someone's opinion (or in this case, simply stating another opinion) on a public forum is exactly the same as trying to impose my value system on that person.

By the way, you totally missed the "me" in

> Keyboard shortcuts give me precision and efficiency, not speed, and that cognitive overload you talk about is a small price to pay.

which quite clearly means that this is a subjective matter.

Thanks for helping policing the internet: we clearly don't need to debate about anything.

I think the key is having the option to use the mouse, in addition to normal Vim keyboard shortcuts. If I'm switching back and forth between Vim and a browser, for instance, I have my right hand on the mouse already, and I can scroll with the wheel, select a tmux pane, copy and paste things, etc. very easily. If I didn't have that option, I'd have to switch back to the keyboard. If I have both hands on the keyboard already, I'm probably not going to use the mouse.

You seem to be conflating Vim and Terminal.

Vim is just one of the many things you can run in a terminal, and just one of the many things you can do with a terminal.

No. I know what the difference is between the two.

And I know that I never use mouse in one or the other. I don't use it for scrolling, I don't use it for pointing and clicking, I don't use for selecting stuff…

REPL? no use for the mouse. htop? no use for the mouse. git/svn/hg? no use for the mouse.

How do you select text then? I'm sure there are ways, but they are certainly not intuitive and I've never bothered to look them up since I don't do this task as often.

Do you mean "select text from whatever is displayed in the terminal" or "select text in Vim"?

I never select or copy anything from the terminal: pbcopy on the Mac OS X and xclip on Linux are what I use to get stuff from the shell into the system clipboard.

I don't think that's what you ask, but in Vim, visual selection is done by hitting v (character-wise), V (line-wise) and Ctrl-v (block-wise) followed by a motion or a text-object: va{, vit and so on.

Yes, I asked about terminal (this whole subthread was about mouse use in terminal). Thanks.

Absolutely. I use a mouse in vim to resize windows. Much less tedious than doing that with a keyboard.

Good mouse support in a terminal is also nice for elinks, which several of my vim shortcuts trigger (company wide code/wiki searches, or similar).

Yes, vim in terminal works really good with a mouse!

Vim sure, more for tmux for me to be honest. Its quicker to resize panes/select things with the mouse at times.

People that take keyboard only to the extreme strike me as adhering to the letter of the law rather than the intent. Whichever works faster for a person is better.

iterm2 does not let me go forward/backward by word (with the option key). anyone know how to fix this?

I might as well answer seeing as I found this out yesterday. Go to the profile options then the keys tab. Then there is an option for left/right option key acting as normal meta or +esc. While meta sounds correct for this, esc+ was recommended and works.

This can be fixed by editing the keybindings for your shell. Bash by default on OS X? If so Google for ".inputrc", mine looks like this:

  # See http://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/kbeoe/you_can_make_readline_and_bash_much_more_user/
  "\eOd": backward-word
  "\e[5D": backward-word  # for OS X
  "\eOc": forward-word
  "\e[5C": forward-word   # for OS X
  "\C-f": reverse-search-history
  "\C-F": reverse-search-history  # for OS X
  #Control-F: reverse-search-history
  #Control-j: menu-complete
  #Control-k: menu-complete-backward
  set bell-style none
  set completion-ignore-case on
  set completion-prefix-display-length 2
  set show-all-if-ambiguous on
  set show-all-if-unmodified on

Yep, and xterm is also aware of them...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com