I love the honesty.
Thanks, George!
https://iterm2.com/features.html
I'll just mention some that I have used and found good.
The drop-down visor like Yakuake is great.
Instant Replay is handy for ephemeral text that gets wiped from the terminal, like TUI apps and scaffolding tools. You can imagine that there's always something like Asciinema recording into a buffer, so you can stop and rewind to catch any output you missed.
The notifications are useful.. I can start a long running task, get on with other things, and get a MacOS notification when that terminal rang a bell.
Global search is good, and searches across tabs. I also set a large scrollback buffer, so I can do a reverse incremental search for strings. You can also use the Triggers facility to highlight any string matches (or regex) whenever they occur in the terminal output. This is great when you are tailing a log and want to know immediately when an expression is output, alerting you that a condition has occurred.
Jumping up and down through the command entry points in a session is useful, if there's a lot of output to cut through (I think vscode terminal also does this).
I've also used the toolbelt side-window when I want to repeat verbose commands on a host where I don't want to set up aliases. There is much more you can do with the toolbelt, including automatically capturing text that matches regex patterns.
There's a lot I haven't mentioned, but those are some features I can recall finding useful.
I give it a try this morning. I can't decide if I'm confortable with it or no.
Having multiple webpage combined with your front and back process traces is nice.
You can move to each panel with the same shortcuts like a sort of simplified linux tile manager within a terminal on mac.
It's also a good idea to interact less with the weird liquid glass redesign.
That's oddly compelling.
I can't put my finger on why, but this might be the most refreshing thing I've seen in a README in years.
Edited for typo.
> AI Integration
Yes, exactly. On top of the existing iTerm2 code, multiplying the attack vector surface significantly.
I actually only use a fraction of the features but the ones I do use seem to be lacking in the few linux terminals I've used.
Things I like:
- easy to switch between tabs (command + arrow), use this all the time
- easy to copy paste (command+c, command+v, same as in the rest of the OS).
- easy to scroll (just passes through scroll events to things like less and bat)
- looks alright with the right font setup
- right click split horizontally/vertically; easy and I do this all the time. And no need to remember the key combos for that.
- it remembers the directory of each tab when I restart it. Simple feature but so nice.
There are a lot of smaller features that you won't notice until they aren't there.
The keybindings are of course a nice side effect of not having to use ctrl for everything, which conflicts with a lot of stuff in terminals (e.g. ctrl+c aborts stuff). There is the "windows" key of course for the last few decades but somehow using that as a modifier never caught on in the Linux world. So keybindings are a bit more awkward. So you have to remember to press ctrl+shift+c, depending on what window you are looking at. Which is something I get wrong every few times I do it.
Anyway, iterm2 is the best terminal across all operating systems I'm aware off. I have a linux laptop as well and I haven't really found anything I liked so far. And I tried essentially all the popular ones.
IMHO the main issue in this space is people geeking out on configuration languages but then forgetting to add a nice usable preference screen in their ultimate iterm2 killer (which seems to set the bar for a lot of these things). I'm sure it's great if you take a sabbatical and make a deep study of the freaking manual to program your settings correctly. But that just makes for a really high barrier of entry. Iterm2 in comparison is very easy to configure but even if you don't do that, it just generally does a lot of things right out of the box that don't need micromanaging.
Anyway, nice upgrade and just generally nice to see this oss product stay fresh and relevant over the years.
In the window manager side of linux, Super ("Mod4") is often used for the windows manager level keybindings.
As for the configuration thing, those things are usually checked in into the dotfiles. So you've done it once four years ago, and you never think about it again. iterm2 is nice, but I'm not sure about the ergonomics advantage for a power user.
Could be interesting to replace htop or other monitoring tools with graphs
I am genuinely curious what the corporate thread models look like that allow running a terminal but not rendering anything in a browser.
Challenge accepted. And it's not a huge challenge. I'd say not even a mild one.
they usually work in kernel extensions or use https://developer.apple.com/documentation/endpointsecurity - which gives them pretty good coverage of all the processes running, and arguments etc
They have no clue what legal requirements are imposed on the company that led to those restrictions. They could easily land themselves or the entire business in hot water by not complying. It doesn't matter how easy the controls are to bypass. Like, it's easy to pick or cut a LOTO lock, but that doesn't mean it's fine to do that.
So while corporate restrictions sometime (but only sometime!) make sense, the configuration where a terminal is allowed while a browser is not - don't.
https://iterm2.com/features.html
If you spend a significant time in the terminal, those are very nice.
Tomorrow we have operating system in the terminal.
That's called emacs
I don't like that I'm supporting the Browser monopoly, but the battery life is supreme++(ARM versions at least), the Linux integration is great, I can run Android apps too(rarely though).
PWA's are integrated really well into ChromeOS so you won't be running one Electron instance per webapp. (My PWA's are Kagi Assistant, WhatsApp, SchildiChat(Element), Discord)
That's called eMacs.
https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_6_1.changelog
It's quite a treat going through iTerm changelogs and finding new gems. For example, this sounds nice:
> [Timestamps] can be configured to be relative to a particular line by right-clicking and selecting "Set Baseline for Relative Timestamps"
The following is interesting too, because it seems to work on an individual cell basis and not just one overall background colour:
> [in editors and other TUIs] Detect when there is a non-default background color and extend it into the margins. In Minimal [theme], it is also extended into window chrome.
Can't see this option so no idea if this works or not
Iterm2 used to be one if my first installs, but these days I find myself in the old grumpy programmer bucket.
Things that should connect to the internet:
- my browser
- applications
- anything I explicitly launch
Things that should not connect to the internet:
- my shell
- my “save as” dialog
- my start menu
:(
> Click hamburger menu → Ask AI to create a new AI chat with the reader-mode content of the current page attached
Yeah yeah cool.
I guess were back into the days of more web browsers with arc and whatever.
I suppose I should just smile and nod; if chrome introduced a terminal would I batt an eyelid?
Still, I dont like it.
I dont want ls to query some external api.
I dont want grep to search the internet.
These these are domain bounded for a reason; Im not a fan of iterms kitchen sync future.
…but I suppose, nice technical work on it, it works quite well. I hope it makes people who are into it happy.
(Yes, I put the browser into my Application folder first & restarted everything)
https://iterm2.com/downloads.html
You can uninstall it and re-install the latest version from here to be double sure
Helix on the left and a Clojure repl at top-right in terminal panes. Portal data viewer in a browser pane at bottom-right.
Obviously a tiny extra effort, and not sure it justifies this feature, but it can add up for some things.
Really appreciate of the feature!
It should ignore unexpected inputs and formats. It should not know what a web page or an image file is.
It should have no idea what it is displaying nor what is happening on the remote end ... I don't want it to know I am more'ing or less'ing or paging, etc. Just show the output.
I feel so strongly about this that I am sometimes tempted to collapse output to ascii-256. I resist this temptation because I sometimes cut and paste foreign URLs ... which my terminal has no idea is a URL.
But "drop this other .app bundle downloaded in your browser anywhere on macOS" is such a strange way of handling plug-in installation.
semi-extrinsic•4mo ago
nixpulvis•4mo ago
pjerem•4mo ago
Use Linux i guess ? I would if I could but my employer let me chose between a shitty Windows 11 PC or a M4 Pro Macbook.
milch•4mo ago
articulatepang•4mo ago