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ITerm2 2.0

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Re: ITerm2 2.0

#101

Post by super_mario »

roeme wrote: post #24
hayksaakian wrote: post #9

to HN: What changed you from "terminal.app is good enough" to "I prefer iTerm"? Because that's what I'm asking myself.

I second this. I'm using Terminal.app for years now, dabbled with iTerm from time to time, but just couldn't see any advantage; since Terminal.app allows me to save window layouts and customize colors - so far, it's all I need from my Terminal emulator. The rest is the shell's job. So what is it?

Mouse reporting. You can scroll text with mouse wheel, you can click on text and move the cursor there, so you can have say vim essentially behave like graphical vim (silly example I know, but still it's useful to some people). You can resize vim split windows with a mouse.

iTerm exports its color profile as shell variable, so you can have vim adjust its color theme to match the terminal theme.

It has better full screen support.

It has support for foreground/background color of the text the cursor is over, which Terminal.app does not have at all. This is why in vim if you cursor is over syntax highlighted element whose color is similar to the cursor color, it become incredibly hard to tell where the cursor is (esp. on large screen).

iTerm has "highlight cursor feature", to quickly show you where the cursor is (CMD+/). This is useful if you went away from the screen for a while and you come back, and can't immediately spot the cursor.

iTerm has better font rendering (more like GUI Vim) because it is a Cocoa view.

iTerm allows you to split terminal windows both horizontally and vertically.

The list goes on, but these are some highlights. Essentially, you have more control over your terminal.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#102

Post by jawns »

On the downloads page, the link text for the stable release says "iTerm2 2.0 (OS 10.6+, Intel-only)" but the description below it says "It requires OS X 10.7+ and an Intel CPU."

Can anybody confirm whether it works on 10.6?

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#103

Post by AlexMax »

hayksaakian wrote: post #9

to HN: What changed you from "terminal.app is good enough" to "I prefer iTerm"? Because that's what I'm asking myself.

For me it used to be two reasons:

* 256-color support. This was added in Lion I believe.

* There's a really weird bug with word-wrapping that only manifests itself in Terminal.app: http://superuser.com/q/46948/5966 As of 10.9, I believe it remains unfixed.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#104

Post by jawns »

jawns wrote: post #102

On the downloads page, the link text for the stable release says "iTerm2 2.0 (OS 10.6+, Intel-only)" but the description below it says "It requires OS X 10.7+ and an Intel CPU." Can anybody confirm whether it works on 10.6?

Answering my own question: I downloaded it on 10.6 and it seems to work correctly.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#105

Post by jasonlotito »

kybernetyk wrote: post #48
PaulMest wrote: post #27

One feature I really wish iTerm2 2.0 would have introduced was better session restoration support. With Terminal.app, you can issue a command like 'ls' and then quit and re-open Terminal.app and the previous output from 'ls' shows up. This is incredibly useful when you have to restart or if your system crashes and you have some output that you wanted to preserve. I see from the changelog that some type of restoration…

> One feature I really wish ... It's open source. Why don't you add it yourself? I wanted a borderless terminal and as I couldn't find one I hacked the functionality into iTerm: http://i.imgur.com/jOc04sf.jpg /edit: Wow, being downvoted for suggesting to hack something yourself on Hacker News ... that's a new one. I guess I'll take a time out.

> Wow, being downvoted for suggesting to hack something yourself on Hacker News ... that's a new one. I guess I'll take a time out.

You'll also get downvoted for complaining about being downvoted. That's almost verboten here, and explicitly mentioned in the guidelines.

When you get downvoted, accept that possible your comment detracts from the conversation. It doesn't just not add anything, but takes away. It's noise.

If your first reaction is to edit your comment and complain, then that's a clear sign you aren't in the right frame of mind to contribute meaningfully.

Your original comment was, if I may be so bold, cliche. Maybe that's the wrong word, but it comes up by someone with your attitude generally every time a thread about an open source project comes along. It literally is something that can go without saying.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#106

Post by themckman »

hayksaakian wrote: post #9

to HN: What changed you from "terminal.app is good enough" to "I prefer iTerm"? Because that's what I'm asking myself.

2 things that do it for me:

Smarter "dobule-click to select" logic. iTerm seems to highlight exactly what I want when I double-click in the area. Last I tried Terminal, it missed the mark.

Select to copy. I know some people can't understand why anyone would want this, but I've become accustomed to it. One thing that does still annoy me, even with iTerm, is that I find after I select something I need to move my mouse for it to copy.

I imagine 256 color support was a deal breaker before Lion, but I'm still an iTerm guy because of those reasons above.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#107

Post by Froist »

itafroma wrote: post #26

Dang, looks like there/s still no preference to disable creating a new window when iTerm launches or is clicked on in the Dock. I only ever use iTerm via system-wide hotkey (i.e. Quake-style HUD mode), and it's kind of annoying that it automatically creates a duplicate window whenever it launches that can't be hidden via the hotkey.

You need to create a saved window arrangement (Window -> Save arrangement) with no windows open, then set this as the default arrangement in Preferences -> Arrangements, and finally change the Startup preference to "Open default window arrangement" (on the General tab).

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#108

Post by linhmtran168 »

voltagex_ wrote: post #8

The tmux integration is a really interesting piece of work. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ABI0kqUUxoAjxhWW3AsWFis6... http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration

I'm just too used to Tmux commands so I feel really slow when using this integration.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#109

Post by rbanffy »

jwr wrote: post #80

ITerm is great. It really is. But I wish more time was spent on optimizations. People these days seem to forget that terminals are often used for displaying huge amounts of rapidly scrolling text and that speed is of paramount importance. To put this in perspective, my computer has two CPUs with 4 cores each, 24GB RAM, a graphics card with 1600 Stream Processing Units (engine running at 850MHz) and 1GB of RAM, and ye…

While text performance is important, when I have to scroll through huge amounts of text it's usually because I made a mistake. If the output of my "fgrep -ri" is too long, it's also useless and I'd better pipe it to another grep or use a better regex.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#110

Post by err4nt »

klausa wrote: post #47
hayksaakian wrote: post #9

to HN: What changed you from "terminal.app is good enough" to "I prefer iTerm"? Because that's what I'm asking myself.

I use Terminal almost exclusively in full-screen mode, and iTerm allows me to do just that. And no, Terminal.app does not have full-screen mode that is useful. Lion-style fullscreen apps are absolutely useless to me, since you can't bind them to ctrl-[1-9] hotkeys to switch between spaces.

I might have a workaround for you! I use a launcher for OS X called 'Quicksilver'. It's free and absolutely changed the way I approach computing (at the speed of thought, not the speed I can aim and click icons on my screen) and one of the handiest features Quicksilver let's you configure is called 'triggers'. Triggers are system-wide shortcuts that run a quicksilver command. So I have a quicksilver trigger for EVERY application I use.

Any time I hit my special trigger key combination, it will 'launch' that app. If it is open it gives it focus, and if it is not running it opens the app. This means I can rearrange my apps and desktops however I like and I always instantly travel to the app I want next.

Terminal is command-shift-I anywhere. Chrome is command-shift-c for example. Firefox is command-shift-f. Let's say I'm editing an HTML file over ssh and I want to test it. It doesn't matter whether chrome or Firefox are running, full screen, on the same virtual desktop, if I strike command-shift-c Chrome is instantly in front of me. I flip between programs all day and don't use my dock except to empty trash (and yes I know command-option-shift-delete but that is living on the edge!)

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