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Comment by infotainment | Hacker News Reader

I never understood the appeal of iTerm2. The built-in terminal app can do basically all the same things except tiling, but there’s always tmux if you need that.

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Hmm! Here are some things I like in iTerm2 :

- Drop down terminal like Yakuake

- Visual bell, can show me when something has finished running

- Great incremental search, with regex supported

- Instant Replay, to allow time travel through anything erased from the terminal (like TUI screen repaints)

- Global search through all open terminals

- Triggers can highlight particular text when outputted on any terminal when a regex is matched

If using the Toolbelt feature :

- Keep track of your paste history

- Allows the use of text snippets to save typing long commands on remote hosts where you can't define an alias

- Show running background jobs and send them signals

If using shell integration:

- Directory name picker based on frecency, which is useful for adding directory names when composing long commands or to jump to a directory when using Zsh (which lets you omit the 'cd' command).

- Hotkeys to jump back to the points of the commands entered, to avoid scrolling back through pages of console output to find the beginning of a command

Some things I like about iTerm:

  + Can open windows and tabs in a preset arrangement
  + Can choose from multiple arrangements across multiple displays
  + Tells me if there's a newline in what I'm about to paste
  + Exports its config to a JSON file in a place I choose
  + I can remove the tab close buttons to prevent a misclick (I'm clumsy)
  + I can change tab colours from a shell script
  + Multiple profiles
  + Text spacing both horizontal and vertical can be tweaked
  + I can log everything displayed and typed in my terminals, for later searching
  + I can disable cmd-clicking on URLs

OK that's enough procrasturbating for now

Terminal.app is a solid piece of software, but it hasn't been updated in an age. It only supports 256 colors, where most terminals support truecolor. It's also a lot slower than other terminal software, as it doesn't do gpu rendering. And there are a number of extensions which are common in modern terminals, but are not supported in Terminal.app.

Granted, not everyone will notice or miss such features in their terminal.

The one thing I miss in the normal Terminal app, coming from iTerm 2, is being able to cmd+click paths and open them.

You can also define custom clickable things via the "Smart Selections" feature. For instance I have all strings that match `\B#([0-9]{2,6})\b` open the page of that GH issue in my companies central issue tracker when they are cmd-clicked, and I have all strings that match `\bU\+([0-9a-fA-F]{2,6})\b` open up a details page for that unicode code point.

Most modern terminals support clicking on urls these days.

IIRC, there’s a plugin or something to enable this in iTerm.

I use WezTerm currently and it supports it out of the box.

Terminal.app supports clicking URLs (cmd+double click). But what I want is to cmd+click (relative) file paths, with no URL scheme prefix. iTerm 2 supports this, and I miss it when I use Terminal.app.

iTerm2 supports it out of the box. The person you’re replying to is lamenting the absence of the feature in Terminal.app.

I moved away from the Terminal because of lack of utf8 support, also I "needed" 24 bit color support - I was working on some silly 24b gradient progress bars at the time.

I've been a happy Kitty user for some years now. It requires a specific termcap, so foreign servers are a royal PITA, otherwise it is pretty nice.

One advantage is that you can define arbitrary margins for your terminal. Thus, you can make your terminal full-screen and write in vim with nice margins, instead of super-wide ones like in the default. Super-wide margins for text are ugly.

`tmux -CC` integrated to the native tab splits and the buffer. That's the killer feature for me. No other terminal emulator has it, not on Mac, not on Linux.

I use the iTerm global shortcut a lot for bringing a terminal window down from the top of the screen on top of any fullscreened app.

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