I used iTerm for many years because it was so much better than Terminal.app.
At the suggestion of a coworker, I recently switched back to regular Terminal.app and it does everything I need, but with much less cpu/ram usage and 'feels' faster. This is one area where Apple has really done a good job in improving things.
As much as I love this alternative solution, I'm mot sure I'd go back to iTerm2 unless I had a specific need that Terminal didn't address.
I used to use Growl until every web page I go to started asking to make notifications that just look like Growl notifications. I don't want anything that even remotely looks that interruptive, so these days I pass on both.
This visor thing, I hadn't seen before. As a user of clfswm on my Raspberry Pis, this is a feature I can go for when on my Mac desktop, since I've gotten used to having a terminal right there whenever I need it (which is pretty often).
Maybe I'm one of the few on HN that doesn't use tmux. I've tried it but found that I guess I'm not enough of a power user (despite having used terminals since the late 80's).
Combination of tabs and sometimes split windows is good enough for me.
iTerm is all about the features. For me, two useful ones are remapping of modifiers and being able to individually set left or right option to Meta/Esc+.
I just double checked and Alacritty is indeed much faster still. This issue is probably the single most important feature for me in a terminal emulator, and unfortunately iTerm2 just doesn't cut it yet.
On my 5k display, at full screen resolution, iTerm2 scrolls in a large vim buffer at max 40fps. Alacritty on the other hand is around 60fps. Not sure how to enable an FPS meter on the Terminal app, but it feels closer to 10-15fps.
I used iTerm2 for years, and am still a Patron, but until GPU acceleration gets to 60fps at 5k resolution, I don't think I'll be switching back. It's still one of my favorite open source projects, and is only one of two that I currently pay for each month. So I sincerely recommend it to anyone who doesn't care too much about terminal performance.
I wish I would want to support iTerm2. I have been using it for years. However, a few problems compound to make me hesitate staying on macOS at all. In particular:
1. I still haven't figured out how to solve the slow performance of vim in iTerm2, despite trying the solutions in multiple posts over the internet; vim in alacritty is also slow.
2. macOS Catalina sucks (32-bit killed off, and the show-stopper mail data loss bug);
3. The latest 16" MacBook Pro keyboard is better than the butterfly design of the last few years, but still not as good as the old scissor design;
4. I want nothing to do with the Touch Bar, except maybe Touch ID.
All in all, I'll probably get my next mobile device from any one of the following manufacturers, and install Linux:
- Dell (XPS 15")
- System76 (Darter Pro)
- Microsoft Surface (Pro, Book, or Laptop line)
- Lenovo (ThinkPad X1 Carbon or Extreme line)
- Purism (Librem 15)
Thankfully, I never really invested a lot of money in macOS-only apps.
Maybe I'll donate to iTerm2 once, as a gesture of gratitude for the past years. But donating regularly as a patron just won't happen for me, I think.
I thought like you and got a nice, well-made laptop and put Linux on it. I tried out the different desktop environments, looked at doing pure Wayland (not ready yet...), but ultimately I went back to macOS. Using Linux is still a death by a thousand tiny cuts. The last cut for me this time around was discovering my laptop would hard-shutdown at 15% battery to “protect the hardware”. No warning. No sleep. No hybrid sleep-then-hibernate. My research points to my partitioning choices (swap file instead of swap partition?) as the reason my device doesn’t hibernate.
On Linux-for-desktop things like “slow performance” (of all the GUI apps) or showstopper bugs are par for the course - you have much more flexibility to route around them, but I found it much more frustrating and time consuming to try to make Ubuntu 18.04 enjoyable and productive than to just go back to Apple’s stuff.
I didn't know that there was a way to financially support iTerm2, an app I've used constantly for many years. iTerm2 is incredibly well executed and regularly updated. Turns out there are multiple ways to help, so I'm now a supporter.
(I think iTerm2 is used by a far larger percentage of HN readers than most other free apps, especially those maintained by one individual, but I may be wrong about that. Maybe the meta-submission is this: if you spend a lot of time using a piece of free software - and enjoy it - and don't contribute code/docs/something to it, see whether there's a way to donate. Doesn't need to be iTerm2.)
I've been using iTerm2 since what feels like forever, I especially value the tmux integration. I've met George Nachman once many years back when he was at Google - a truly humble and soft spoken person. Really appreciate the work he's done on iTerm2!
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At the suggestion of a coworker, I recently switched back to regular Terminal.app and it does everything I need, but with much less cpu/ram usage and 'feels' faster. This is one area where Apple has really done a good job in improving things.
As much as I love this alternative solution, I'm mot sure I'd go back to iTerm2 unless I had a specific need that Terminal didn't address.
The Hotkey Window a.k.a a Quake style dropdown transparent visor
https://www.iterm2.com/features.html
It is surprisingly useful.
This visor thing, I hadn't seen before. As a user of clfswm on my Raspberry Pis, this is a feature I can go for when on my Mac desktop, since I've gotten used to having a terminal right there whenever I need it (which is pretty often).
Combination of tabs and sometimes split windows is good enough for me.
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https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty
On my 5k display, at full screen resolution, iTerm2 scrolls in a large vim buffer at max 40fps. Alacritty on the other hand is around 60fps. Not sure how to enable an FPS meter on the Terminal app, but it feels closer to 10-15fps.
I used iTerm2 for years, and am still a Patron, but until GPU acceleration gets to 60fps at 5k resolution, I don't think I'll be switching back. It's still one of my favorite open source projects, and is only one of two that I currently pay for each month. So I sincerely recommend it to anyone who doesn't care too much about terminal performance.
1. I still haven't figured out how to solve the slow performance of vim in iTerm2, despite trying the solutions in multiple posts over the internet; vim in alacritty is also slow.
2. macOS Catalina sucks (32-bit killed off, and the show-stopper mail data loss bug);
3. The latest 16" MacBook Pro keyboard is better than the butterfly design of the last few years, but still not as good as the old scissor design;
4. I want nothing to do with the Touch Bar, except maybe Touch ID.
All in all, I'll probably get my next mobile device from any one of the following manufacturers, and install Linux:
- Dell (XPS 15")
- System76 (Darter Pro)
- Microsoft Surface (Pro, Book, or Laptop line)
- Lenovo (ThinkPad X1 Carbon or Extreme line)
- Purism (Librem 15)
Thankfully, I never really invested a lot of money in macOS-only apps.
Maybe I'll donate to iTerm2 once, as a gesture of gratitude for the past years. But donating regularly as a patron just won't happen for me, I think.
On Linux-for-desktop things like “slow performance” (of all the GUI apps) or showstopper bugs are par for the course - you have much more flexibility to route around them, but I found it much more frustrating and time consuming to try to make Ubuntu 18.04 enjoyable and productive than to just go back to Apple’s stuff.
That's a completely fair opinion, but in that case, don't upvote it. As https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html says, "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate."
(I think iTerm2 is used by a far larger percentage of HN readers than most other free apps, especially those maintained by one individual, but I may be wrong about that. Maybe the meta-submission is this: if you spend a lot of time using a piece of free software - and enjoy it - and don't contribute code/docs/something to it, see whether there's a way to donate. Doesn't need to be iTerm2.)