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iTerm2 increasingly seems too complex and bloated to me, with too many security issues. I haven't shopped for a new terminal emulator on macOS in a long time, b
by jey 2y ago
iTerm2 increasingly seems too complex and bloated to me, with too many security issues. I haven't shopped for a new terminal emulator on macOS in a long time, but perhaps it's now time.
I should also get around to switching to tmux, now that GNU Screen seems to be stagnant...
- slavomirvojacek 2y agoI switched to Warp, much snappier, some AI features, overall very good experience. Also Ghostty is apparently good.
- baq 2y agoI’ve been using tmux for over a decade because screen was a bit on the legacy side back then
- retrofuturism 2y agoI recently gave Ghostty a chance and have since switched over from iTerm2 completely. It's very familiar and polished.
- hmeh 2y agoSame. So far so good.
- akerl_ 2y agoProbably worth noting that Ghostty was very recently vulnerable to an old/familiar class of terminal vuln that bit a bunch of older terminal applications a while back: https://dgl.cx/2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title https://dgl.cx/2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title So moving to a newer / less "bloated" terminal may also just wind the clock back and cause you to encounter a similar sequence of vulns again, like some kind of unfortunate real-world "New Game Plus".
- jolux 2y agoHaving a vuln that many other terminal emulators have had is pretty different from the string of unique and extremely bad vulns that iTerm has had over the years. It’s possible that we’ll see similar from Ghostty, but it’s a much newer and I believe smaller codebase, so I’m willing to give it a second chance.
- akerl_ 2y agoI've been using iTerm daily for something like a decade at this point and I'm struggling to think of any examples of this string of extremely bad vulns. There's this one, which is specific to SSH integration. There was CVE-2024-38396, which is the window title escape sequences I was talking about above. What others am I missing?
- jolux 2y agoHow about making DNS requests for everything you hover over to determine if it’s a URL? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/iterm2-leaks-everything-you-hover-in-your-terminal-via-dns-requests/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/iterm2-leaks-...
- samatman 2y agoGhostty has also been out for what, a week? So this is the open season / shakedown, when security researchers get to try out all the old favorites and see what got missed. I don't think there are larger lessons to draw from that occurrence. A reputation for security has to be earned, and Ghostty hasn't been around long enough for that. From my vantage point it's on track, but only time will tell.
- akerl_ 2y agoI'm not trying to knock either Ghostty in particular or new software in general. But the kind of "open season" phase you're referring to is basically the same point I'm making: new software still has to go through the phase where they work through their security model, have it probed by researchers, and earn their reputation.
- woadwarrior01 2y agoI did the same. Although, Ghostty doesn't seem to have support for Find (⌘-F), yet. Also, had some minor hiccups with it and tmux on remote hosts.
- NovaX 2y agoI've resorted to using Cmd-Shift-J (scrollback buffer) and grepping that, but its flaky about whether it will honor the command and emit a history file.
- dave4420 2y agoI tried Ghostty earlier in the week, but couldn’t get it set up to look the same as iterm2 (the colours are off and text looks different somehow with the same typeface at the same size). Which is just cosmetic but makes it feel wrong viscerally. I’ll give it another go at the weekend.
- crabique 2y agoSomehow this is the first time I see anyone else bring this up, but the fonts are absolutely displayed with wrong kerning on my mac, for my font (at 12pt) I was able to make it look the same as iTerm2 with adjust-cell-{width,height} both set to -5%.
- Hamuko 2y agoI had an issue where Ghostty failed to render the text "th", so I think Ghostty just generally has a lot of font issues. Gave up trying to use it within minutes.
- samatman 2y agoGhostty supports iTerm themes, so you should be able to transfer your preferred look-and-feel directly. I just picked one I liked, so I'm not familiar with the process, but it can be done.
- d4rkp4ttern 2y agoCould you please point to the docs about how to transfer iTerm2 themes to Ghostty? I couldn't find it.
- samatman 2y agoIt looks like the process is more manual than I thought, sorry. There's something which imports themes from the iTerm2 color schemes website weekly, but from what I can find that isn't a feature which ships with Ghostty itself. Here's the relevant docs page, which I hope explains why I mistakenly thought that transferring a theme directly from iTerm to Ghostty was possible. You could upload your theme to the website they're being sourced from, and wait a week. But that's clearly not the same thing. https://ghostty.org/docs/features/theme https://ghostty.org/docs/features/theme
- crabique 2y agoUnfortunately, it's nowhere near close feature-wise just yet: proper quake mode, search, prompt navigation, line timestamps, tab output indicators, forced keyboard locales, customizable toolbar with user-defined variables/indicators, are all too useful to give up iTerm2 for anything.
- lilyball 2y agoWhat's not proper about Ghostty's quake mode?
- Aeolos 2y agoIt does not support tabs, for one.
- __float 2y agoWhat is "proper Quake mode"? Have you tried https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#toggle_quick_terminal https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#toggle_qui...? (I don't have the habit to use this feature, but I'd like to!) The others do sound useful too -- I personally hit a lot of spurious "tab output indicator" notifications in iTerm2, but if it _did_ work I could see how giving it up would be painful.
- Geezus_42 2y agoI got the toggle working, but couldn't get background transparency.
- crabique 2y agoProper quake mode is just one shortcut to show/hide the entire terminal window, otherwise the app is completely hidden from the app switcher and the dock. This also involves handling macOS keyboard-to-app layout mapper not reacting to this event as the window loses its first-class citizen status in this mode.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoI tried iTerm’s quake mode after the Visor haxie for Terminal.app was shuttered, but unfortunately was left disappointed. Its behavior is kinda glitchy and inconsistent in comparison, which was surprising because one would expect a native feature to be better than one hacked in by a third party, but that was not the case here.
- rcpt 2y agoI tried Ctrl+r while she'd and it didn't work. Otherwise ghosty looked great
- segasaturn 2y agoI tried Ghostty but the configuration file seems to be flakey. For example I wasn't able to turn off the cursor blinking in it (huge distraction for me) despite there being a configuration flag for it, it just wouldn't take it.
- auscompgeek 2y agoThere's a known issue where the shell integration doesn't respect that setting when it sets the cursor shape. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812
- dsego 2y agoHave you tried shell-integration-features = no-cursor ?
- kergonath 2y agoI am using both at the moment, but iTerm has many, many features missing in ghostty. Most of them are not huge, but overall that’s a lot of paper cuts. Ultimately I wish both will stick around. Both have good ideas and I’d like them to keep evolving.
- tylersmith 2y agoGhostty hasn't had to put out a critical update since before 1.0 launched.
- throwaway314155 2y ago> It's very familiar... It is? Because as far as I can tell it is deliberately quite different from iTerm2. No GUI for preferences, for instance. Not knocking it, it's a great terminal. I wouldn't describe it as "familiar" though, unless you're switching from, say, WezTerm or Alacritty.
- FreePalestine1 2y agoDoes Ghostty support natural text editing like iTerm2 does?
- dsego 2y agoI also switched over to Ghostty, but now can't do Cmd+F to search for strings, I think it's on the roadmap though. Also, there are no scroll bars on the Mac version, which I guess is not that important for a terminal.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoI don't use Mac but what's wrong with the default? > GNU Screen seems to be stagnant Is it stagnant or mostly complete?
- betaby 2y agoComplete I would say. However Mac uses GNU software from around 2006, since around that time a lot of GNU software switched from GPLv2 to GPLv3. That means Mac ships GNU screen version 4 from 2006, while latest version is 5.
- walterbell 2y agov4 2006: feature complete, survived 18 years of attacks v5 2024: new auth functionality, survived 4 months of attacks
- brabel 2y ago> I don't use Mac but what's wrong with the default? Nothing, it works great. As someone who tried a bunch of alternatives: sorry but it's a waste of time unless you look at the long list of iterm2 features (terminal.app has many of them anyway) and think you might use those often (I don't, quite happy with my other apps covering for most of the features missing from the terminal.app): https://iterm2.com/features.html https://iterm2.com/features.html
- lelandfe 2y agoI try out the new apps each year and always go back to Terminal.app. My one gripe with it was that Opt-Del didn't delete words, which I learned last year can be fixed by Preferences > Profiles > Keyboard > Use Option as Meta key Long live Terminal.app
- Klonoar 2y ago“Too complex” and “bloated” are catch-all that you should consider expanding further on. I don’t personally iTerm2 to be be either of those.
- kergonath 2y agoIt is a bit slow, though.
- zenapollo 2y agoWould xpipe be a candidate? It’s also quite feature packed, but i was pleasantly surprised how nicely it got out of my way
- paulddraper 2y ago> now that GNU Screen seems to be stagnant... That's not a new thing...
- Aloha 2y agoWhat else does it need? I get old code smell, and why folks might want something architecturally different, whatever - but screen is functionally feature complete.
- icedchai 2y agoI've considered "screen" complete since I started using it over 30 years ago.
- Aloha 2y agoSame - I'm at about 20 years give or take. It also has every feature known to exist in this space. I agree though that the world is moving in the way of tmux - I'll get around to switching occasionally.
- cozzyd 2y agoVertical splits? (I know they can be patched in)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jey 2y agoI recently ran into a bunch of problems running neovim under GNU Screen with `TERM=screen.xterm-256color`. There was some kind of problem relating to GNU Screen's parsing and re-transmit of certain full-color terminal escape codes. I don't remember the details right now, but what I know is that building the latest from source didn't help. (I wish I could remember the specific issues)
- JohnBooty 2y agoI haven't looked super hard, but an iTerm feature I "gotta have" is triggers - regexps that match lines of text in the terminal and do an action. You can do some complex stuff with them, but I "just" use them to highlight specific things when tailing output. Some of it might be possible with grep, but probably not
- mhink 2y agoI really like alacritty + tmux, personally.
- dylan604 2y agoI have used Terminal.app since 10.0, and have never felt like it needed replacing. What is lacking in Terminal that would improve my day to day by using a different app?
- Vegenoid 2y agoIn my opinion, the most notable feature missing from Terminal.app is 24-bit color support. This is a standard feature in modern terminal emulators, and is one that I enjoy very much. But for many people, that is not a feature that makes a big difference.
- tom_ 2y agoThat's a question that only you can answer. We have no idea what your average terminal activity involves. (I can't remember why I switched. It must have been 10 years ago now, maybe more, and I've stuck with iTerm2 ever since (even though it annoys me with a new beta update practically every time I launch it). It could have been nothing fancier than the vertical window split. But there was definitely something that persuaded me to change!) EDIT: this did get me wondering, and I noticed two things it does have that it looks like Terminal still doesn't: configurable mouse selection word boundary chars, and implicit copy-to-clipboard on selection. As an inveterate mouse selector, I wonder if it was these. I might well actually have the word boundary chars still set to the default ("/-+\~_." is what I've got), but I do use the click-to-copy a lot.
- jonstewart 2y agoThere's a mini-renaissance going on with new terminal tools, like tmux, neovim (which has an ecosystem of plugins itself), htop, and many more (https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis). They take greater advantage of 24-bit color, "nerd" fonts (that have icons for glyphs), some graphics capability, and so on. I used Terminal for many years, too, but switched to iTerm2 a little over a year ago as I wanted to learn neovim.
- lolpanda 2y agoI'm a heavy use of tmux integration in iterm2. this allows seamless mouse scroll in a tmux window. I haven't seen any other terminals that provide the same tmux support.
- jitl 2y agoWezterm doesn’t have tmux integration but instead implements multiplexing natively, meaning if you install it on a remote, it will host a mux server you can attach to over ssh. Pretty cool, and much faster/lower latency than tmux.
- Fnoord 2y agoStill use GNU Screen? Both GNU Screen and tmux had security issues in past, but GNU Screen had worse ones and that is why I switched. Zellij is a Rust terminal multiplexer, might wanna look into that. What I especially love about it, is tge discoverability of the keybinds. TUI wet dream.
- waynesonfire 2y ago> GNU Screen seems to be stagnant... Not at all, it just had a release a few months ago, GNU Screen v.5.0.0 is released posted by anaumov, Wed 28 Aug 2024 09:41:30 PM UTC