Live data from Hacker News

ITerm2 2.0

iterm2.com

191–200 of 237 posts

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#192
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can disable window restoration system wide (System Preferences -> General -> "Close windows when quitting an app"). So you don't have to use the shortcut at all in that case. Personally I prefer getting used to using it on a case-by-case basis. For example, when I leave work I tend to quit most apps on my laptop with Cmd+Option+Q, so that when I get home they don't re-open with work and I can start working on per…

I don't want to disable it system-wide -- just for the terminal! I'll just have to get used to cmd-opt-q.

  defaults write com.apple.Terminal NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false
or something similar ought to do the trick

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#194
post #86
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…

Not just fast scrolling text. For some reason there is a noticeable delay when just typing text into a shell in iTerm. I didn't notice it until one day I started Terminal.app for no reason at all, and typing in it gave me that feeling that it was predicting my keystrokes, meaning of course that my brain expected a lag that wasn't there.

What's hilarious is that nine or ten years ago, the opposite was true: Terminal lagged greatly, and iTerm was much faster.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important benefit for me is the "Hot key" feature. I used to have Kuake back in my Linux days, and loved it. It's so much more convenient that having many different screens, and switching between them via "Cmd-Tab". It's gotten to the point where I very rarely open dedicated windows, unless I'm doing some serious debugging or so. For those who don't know about the hot key; I press "Ctrl-~" to have a terminal…

There is a tool named TotalTerminal (formerly "Visor") for the Mac which extends Terminal.app and does exactly this. I even have control-~ mapped to the behaviour. It seems pretty configurable, and hooks nicely into the prefs window of Terminal itself. You can hit cmd-opt-F to temporarily switch the current Terminal into full-screen mode, in case you need to delve into a particular task. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/…

Yes, I also used to have TotalTerminal. But I found that using iTerm from the ground up was somehow more convenient than using TotalTerminal with the regular Terminal. Don't quite remember what was the particular reason.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#196
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Wow, this is great: it still creates a new window when clicking on the dock, but it no longer creates one on startup. That's still a lot better than before. Thanks!

Ah, I work with iTerm hidden from the dock and purely in "Visor" mode. If I actually want a regular window to keep around, I can create one by bringing up the visor and then hitting Cmd+N.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#197

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.

> It's open source. Why don't you add it yourself?

This attitude seriously needs to die.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#198
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive question, but I keep trying iTerm and not being able to quite figure out why I should switch. In the mid-2000s it was a much better program than Terminal.app, but that doesn't seem to have been true for quite some time. Terminal.app has tabs, 256-color mode, themes, full screen support, and as people have mentioned in other comments, session recovery and much better performance. The only things I can think of o…

I'm in a shell most of my day when not in meetings. I love being able to have a nice full screen with vertical and horizontal splits (Cmd-D or Shift-Cmd-D) with thin lines between each split. Also iTerm helps me keep my hand off my mouse and when I do use my mouse iTerm makes my usage very efficient (double click to copy text .. Cmd-V paste, right-click lots of stuff right in your face on the spot..) I'm less about t…

If I could ask an unrelated question, what are you using to power 2 external monitors on your MBP? I have a 30" monitor at $work, but a pair of smaller monitors would be even better.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#199
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…

Did you try out the new iTerm? I was having issues like this, and started using the iterm nightlies about 8 months ago. I've seen considerable performance improvements, and now prefer it over Terminal.app.

In case you missed gnachman's comment above, the performance work in the nightlies isn't in 2.0 yet.

Re: ITerm2 2.0

#200

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.

I dislike your comment but I like your borderless hack. Have you attempted to contribute it back?
Post reply on HN