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Comment by jadiofan | Hacker News Reader

iTerm2 is great, thanks to George Nachman for the hard work. I recently installed Mojave from scratch, fresh and clean environment. I'm trying to keep things pretty minimal. I'm giving Terminal (macOS) another shot - so far it's been great. I've only missed split panes but when I really needed I used tmux. Other than that I realize I didn't use much of the functionality offered by iTerm2.

What are the features in iTerm2 that you use the most?

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- Auto-summon of the Password Manager on password prompts

- Grep for things that look like IP address and color them in blue, or errors in red

- Auto-Complete based on the text in terminal

- Broadcast same keypresses into several panes (having SSH sessions to several servers)

- Making an icon jump when a long running command just finished

- etc.etc.

I know people who returned their company-issued X1 Carbons and bought an out-of-pocket MacBooks just so they can use iTerm.

Honestly, while it isn't a feature that's unique to iTerm2 by any means, I just appreciate how easy it is to theme the colors and appearance. I used Arch Linux for many years before moving to Mac OS and messing around with urxvt configuration files if I wanted full 256 color or font support was somewhat tedious. It's nice to just have something that's easy to setup and always works and looks the way I want given I'm looking at my terminal for 75% of my day.

Setting the background to the solarized dark or light color pallet works nicely with the same vim pallet setup. I wanted to use this as an example because I don't believe this worked in Terminal last time I tried it. But after a quick google search it seems like you can use Terminal for this setup as well.

Clicking on links in the terminal is a nice feature. If you press cmd + click it opens your browser or finder. I occasionally enjoy this convenience.

There are probably other conveniences that don't come to mind now.

> Clicking on links in the terminal is a nice feature. If you press cmd + click it opens your browser or finder. I occasionally enjoy this convenience.

On Terminal.app you can cmd + double click to open a link on the browser. (it doesn't open a path on finder though)

Font ligatures are what’s keeping me on iTerm right now.

I tried the same thing a year or so ago and there were a few items that brought me back to iTerm2. They’re going to seem super minor, but I use them often enough that it made a difference.

Text selection is better and customizable. Makes it easier to select things like up addresses with a double click.

Hotkey window is just too damn convenient. I end up using it all the time when I just need to execute one-off commands.

It’s gonna sound super minor, but

I use Hammerspoon to hotkey Terminal (and a bunch of other apps with other shortcuts) with ctrl+` like I used to do with iTerm:

  -- Give Terminal the same toggle as iTerm 2
  hs.hotkey.bind('ctrl', '`', function()
  if hs.application.title(hs.application.frontmostApplication()) == "Terminal" then
  hs.eventtap.keyStroke('cmd', 'h')
  else
  hs.application.launchOrFocus("Terminal.app")
  end
  end)

I’m not opposed to iTerm, but I needed a break from heavy customized environments for a bit and this was the one feature I needed to replicate.

- Hot key to summon/dismiss persistent terminal session

- Ability to create arbitrary handlers for mouse click actions

- Ability to save my configuration in version-controlled JSON

- Autocomplete

- Conventional full screen mode (not the weird MacOS thing that creates a new desktop)

>What are the features in iTerm2 that you use the most?

Quake-like drop-down animation.

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