Hacker News Reader

Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

I reject the persistent meme that iTerm2 is somehow essential.

Apple do a great job with the builtin Terminal.app

Just that the prompt automatically goes on a new line makes iTerm2 so nice though. As well as the built in timing of commands, jump to previous prompt, double click selects matching parentheses, etc. it's those little details.

>Just that the prompt automatically goes on a new line makes iTerm2 so nice though.

Not sure what you mean here, but I don't think that's something you don't get, or can't get, on Terminal.app. In fact, that's the default...

If you have a command that doesn't print a new line, the prompt normally ends up on the same line as the output of the last command. iTerm can "fix" this.

See this is where I would rather have my terminal obey the program rather than imposing its own behavior. IMO a good terminal should be extremely minimal, and anything extra should be opt-in.

This is an option that you can enable. It's not on by default.

Don’t shells usually fix this? I know that Fish at least includes a little Unicode “return” arrow when it appends a newline.

zsh does this out of the box, and Apple is defaulting to it in Catilina.

iTerm is amazing when using many spaces because of the hotkey overlay.

Projects and project parts are separated via spaces but I never want to have to find the right terminal for a process, instead I use a single window with animations disabled (to show immediately) and excluded from app switcher via settings so that it will only ever show up when i press alt-space no matter which space I'm on.

Together with tabs and native panes it works just great and requires very little setup

I agree, Terminal is great. But I prefer iTerm because it supports split panes (including saving/restoring a particular configuration) without tmux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com