5 ms·

I love iTerm, couldn't live without it.. To me Terminal.app isn't much better then PuTTY on Windows. That said I'm a bit worried when I read stuff like "manipu

by kator 12y ago

I love iTerm, couldn't live without it.. To me Terminal.app isn't much better then PuTTY on Windows. That said I'm a bit worried when I read stuff like "manipulate the pasteboard remotely" and "performed when text matching a regular expression is received". Are these potential security concerns and/or what is the performance impact of regex'ing every single line of text etc?

gnachman 12y ago
Remote pasteboard twiddling is guarded by an off-by-default preference (prefs>general>allow clipboard access to terminal apps). Triggers are user-defined; while most people use them to change text colors, you are given enough rope to hang yourself, so be careful when creating a trigger that runs a command.
philsnow 12y ago
PuTTY on windows is a fantastic terminal emulator, certainly the best one available for windows that I'm aware of. Despite all the configurability, it still feels quite minimalistic. A single fullscreen PuTTY window is my favorite way to use a windows machine.
- kator 12y ago
  Booting a Linux install disk is my favorite way to use a Windows machine.. ;-) Just kidding, I love PuTTY in windows but it's not my favorite emulator. I actually enjoyed Centry Term's TinyTERM [1] but I have a feeling that is WAY before most people here's time. I still have a couple 3" floppies with TinyTERM on them and a copy of the activation codes. [1] http://www.centurysoftware.com/products/tinyterm-terminal-emulator.php http://www.centurysoftware.com/products/tinyterm-terminal-em...
  - rplnt 12y ago
    You might be kidding, but I actually run VMWare Player with full-screen linux at all times to have a terminal. It's free, switching to VM is simple alt-tab. You can share folders/drives, copy/paste works, it's even accelerated so I can use any "modern" window manager. Only things missing are snapshots, but I don't have those on hardware either. If I need to reboot the host, I can just pause the VM.
chipotle_coyote 12y ago
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 offhand that that leaves in iTerm's court -- at least in the 1.x series -- is tmux integration and autocompletion. The latter I've never seen the point of (my shell does that pretty well, thanks) and after trying the former it seemed like it was more bothersome than just letting tmux handle everything on its own. Okay: iTerm can put borders around its windows, which one of my friends says Terminal.app's inability to do makes it unusable for him. But beyond that, I just haven't been sold. (If that's the right phrase for free software. You know what I mean.) [Edit: I think the tmux integration was a 2.x-dev feature, so I must have been using that. IIRC, I actually preferred tmux's own "window" handling.]
- jedediah 12y ago
  iTerm's ability to make "non-lion" fullscreen windows is worth a tremendous amount to me.
  - alxndr 12y ago
    Agreed! This is a killer feature for me. Would love to be able to disable Lion-style fullscreen across the board....
- ripter 12y ago
  Interesting, I've been using iTerm for so long that I didn't realize that Terminal.app added themes and tabs. That was the primary reason I used iTerm in the first place.
- kator 12y ago
  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 tabs and more about splits, with two 24" monitors and my 13" MBP on my desk I can have lots of text space to work with and very little window distraction from window chrome. Maybe it's just because I'm old fashioned and I love to live on the command prompt (vim -vs- sublime all day long) and I grew up in the era of TTY's and 300 Baud modems.. iTerm feels more natural then Terminal.app, it feels like a terminal someone would use all day long -vs- something you hop in for 20 seconds to type some obscure OSX command you cut-paste'd from some site. In the past I ran into dumb emulation issues with Terminal.app like wrapping and stuff that didn't work right. iTerm seems to be a "programmers" terminal more then a simple utility to get to the command line.

by kator 12y ago

gnachman 12y ago

Remote pasteboard twiddling is guarded by an off-by-default preference (prefs>general>allow clipboard access to terminal apps). Triggers are user-defined; while most people use them to change text colors, you are given enough rope to hang yourself, so be careful when creating a trigger that runs a command.

philsnow 12y ago

PuTTY on windows is a fantastic terminal emulator, certainly the best one available for windows that I'm aware of. Despite all the configurability, it still feels quite minimalistic. A single fullscreen PuTTY window is my favorite way to use a windows machine.

kator 12y ago
Booting a Linux install disk is my favorite way to use a Windows machine.. ;-) Just kidding, I love PuTTY in windows but it's not my favorite emulator. I actually enjoyed Centry Term's TinyTERM [1] but I have a feeling that is WAY before most people here's time. I still have a couple 3" floppies with TinyTERM on them and a copy of the activation codes. [1] http://www.centurysoftware.com/products/tinyterm-terminal-emulator.php http://www.centurysoftware.com/products/tinyterm-terminal-em...
- rplnt 12y ago
  You might be kidding, but I actually run VMWare Player with full-screen linux at all times to have a terminal. It's free, switching to VM is simple alt-tab. You can share folders/drives, copy/paste works, it's even accelerated so I can use any "modern" window manager. Only things missing are snapshots, but I don't have those on hardware either. If I need to reboot the host, I can just pause the VM.

chipotle_coyote 12y ago

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 offhand that that leaves in iTerm's court -- at least in the 1.x series -- is tmux integration and autocompletion. The latter I've never seen the point of (my shell does that pretty well, thanks) and after trying the former it seemed like it was more bothersome than just letting tmux handle everything on its own. Okay: iTerm can put borders around its windows, which one of my friends says Terminal.app's inability to do makes it unusable for him. But beyond that, I just haven't been sold. (If that's the right phrase for free software. You know what I mean.) [Edit: I think the tmux integration was a 2.x-dev feature, so I must have been using that. IIRC, I actually preferred tmux's own "window" handling.]

jedediah 12y ago
iTerm's ability to make "non-lion" fullscreen windows is worth a tremendous amount to me.
- alxndr 12y ago
  Agreed! This is a killer feature for me. Would love to be able to disable Lion-style fullscreen across the board....
ripter 12y ago
Interesting, I've been using iTerm for so long that I didn't realize that Terminal.app added themes and tabs. That was the primary reason I used iTerm in the first place.
kator 12y ago
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 tabs and more about splits, with two 24" monitors and my 13" MBP on my desk I can have lots of text space to work with and very little window distraction from window chrome. Maybe it's just because I'm old fashioned and I love to live on the command prompt (vim -vs- sublime all day long) and I grew up in the era of TTY's and 300 Baud modems.. iTerm feels more natural then Terminal.app, it feels like a terminal someone would use all day long -vs- something you hop in for 20 seconds to type some obscure OSX command you cut-paste'd from some site. In the past I ran into dumb emulation issues with Terminal.app like wrapping and stuff that didn't work right. iTerm seems to be a "programmers" terminal more then a simple utility to get to the command line.