
ITerm 2 - xtacy
http://sites.google.com/site/iterm2home/
======
burgerbrain
_"An iTerm2 exclusive feature. Type the start of a word and press Cmd-;. A
popup window opens at the cursor position with completion suggestions."_

Surely that is best left as a shell feature...

EDIT: if the author is reading this, you link to a page which describes the
incorrect way of enabling 256 colors in Vim
([http://kevin.colyar.net/2011/01/pretty-vim-color-schemes-
in-...](http://kevin.colyar.net/2011/01/pretty-vim-color-schemes-in-
iterm2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pretty-vim-color-schemes-
in-iterm2)). It suggests using `:set t_Co=256`, but that is generally
considered by the Vim community (#vim on freenode) as the improper way of
doing it. The _correct_ way to do it is to just set your TERM env variable
correctly (iterm _does_ come with or support terminfo that indicates 256 color
support, right?).

~~~
kordless
Features which utilize or cross over multiple shell instances probably belong
in the terminal emulator. Autocompletion could be considered one of these if
you were editing multiple files on different machines.

~~~
burgerbrain
Any auto-completion that the terminal emulator could possibly provide will
absolutely pale in comparison to what a properly configured shell can do.

Just copy over your shell config file if you're really in a poor situation
like that often, and it's pretty trivial to make a script that'll automate it.

~~~
deno
Surely a decent shell could provide some additional functionality to terminal
using e.g. D-Bus (I'm not sure what standard desktop IPC is in OSX).

I'm not convinced auto-completion is one of them though. But hey, if you like
GUI popups better it's certainly hackable!

~~~
burgerbrain
It's certainly something that _could_ be done, but also something that
_shouldn't_ be done. You would have to make modifications to every possible
shell the user might want to use, and these would only be a feature usable in
a very select few terminal emulators. It creates _way_ more work because, in
short, it's a violation of the Unix design philosophy.

EDIT: The way you'd do this is to provide additional functionality to the
shell, not to the terminal.

~~~
deno
(Haven't noticed your reply; my guess is you won't notice mine now... oh well)

> It's certainly something that _could_ be done, but also something that
> _shouldn't_ be done.

I was just thinking out loud how it _could_ be done, so I don't see any
disagreement here.

> You would have to make modifications to every possible shell the user might
> want to use, and these would only be a feature usable in a very select few
> terminal emulators.

Well, it'd be optional addition. Furthermore...

> It creates way more work because, in short, it's a violation of the Unix
> design philosophy.

Already shells attempt to detect if your terminal support color output,
scrolling etc.

Your shell would still go around its usual business (e.g. auto-completion),
the only thing that changes is how you're going to present that functionality
to the user. And if terminal you're outputting to is happy to provide a popup,
then why not use it? I don't see how that violates Unix design philosophy.

> EDIT: The way you'd do this is to provide additional functionality to the
> shell, not to the terminal.

Yes, that seems to be more accurate. The shell would make use of the
additional capabilities provided by terminal.

------
angrycoder
On neat thing I discovered on accident a few days ago. If you make Iterm2
fullscreen, then alt tab to another application, it stays in full screen mode
in the background. So it is basically like having a terminal as your
wallpaper.

~~~
pak
If you have a rather large monitor, that might put your terminal at a
ridiculous size. For quick access to Terminal.app, Quake console style, I use
Visor, which slides it down from the top of the screen on a global hotkey:

<http://visor.binaryage.com/>

One of the handiest SIMBL's I've ever found.

~~~
wahnfrieden
I like Visor, but it doesn't play nice with Witch.app at all, which I use to
do per-window alt-tabbing (as opposed to per-application cmd-tabbing, which
isn't always what I want since it brings _all_ the windows of an app to the
foreground). It also makes cmd-` behave a bit weirdly.

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JunkDNA
This is great news. It mystifies me that Apple has such a beautiful UI, but
Terminal.app doesn't support 256 colors. It makes vim on a remote machine look
like garbage and is inexcusable. I'm anxious to try this out.

~~~
mitjak
Out of curiosity: what do you mean by a "beautiful UI"? It looks like just
every other terminal I've used.

~~~
stanleydrew
He was referring to OSX's UI.

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mmelin
Split panes and full screen is just _awesome_. I've been experimenting with
running a Linux VM with the awesome window manager, solely because I want more
or less automatic window management for my terminals. With iTerm 2 I get
awesome terminal management without, well, awesome.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
You should try tmux also

~~~
wahnfrieden
GNU screen can also split, but tmux's paning is much nicer, yeah.

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teilo
I used iTerm a long time ago, but I hated it's font rendering. I imagine that
1.x series improved it at some point, but it's been off my radar so long I
never bothered to check again. This, however, is fabulous. I love the ability
to tweak the ANSI colors without having to resort to SIMBL hacks.

~~~
icefox
The biggest problem with iTerm was the fact that if you left it running it
would constantly eat up 1-2% of your cpu and never go to idle. This really
hurt the battery life on any laptop.

~~~
gnachman
Background CPU utilization is much lower in iTerm2 (though still not quite 0,
I'm working on it). And the next version will have support for controlling the
thickness of antialiased text, which should resolve some complaints about font
rendering.

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mmaunder
Very little that screen + bash don't already do. But ill take it because maybe
it fixes the bugs iterm has.

~~~
wahnfrieden
256 colors - the only reason I use MacVim instead of vim in the shell.

------
anywho
been using this for a few months now. Fantastic, and George is a great guy and
maintainer for this app. Very quick to respond and updates frequently.

Biggest wins?

* 256 color

* xterm mouse reporting

* more configurable - why do I need scrollbars when I always use screen/tmux?

* split panes - as good as screen :)

~~~
guylhem
I remember spending some time with iTerm in the past, and being frustrated
when it crashed, but since I found out about controllermate I reverted to
terminal.app

My reasons :

* 99% of what I need is there by default (ex: the 4 features here are not important to me)

* stable

* shipped by default, no need to spend time downloading yet another application, following the upgrades etc

* when I need some very special shortcut that terminal.app won't allow me to remap, ex ctrl-numbers, that's a job I can do within controllermate.

Ex: while reading about iterm2 features, I thought this visor key stuff seemed
potentially usefull. I did that with CM, mapping the insert key to bring
terminal.app to the front, or option-tab to the previous application if it is
already focused.

CM is not mandatory : option-arrows can be remapped directly in terminal.app
(and there's alwarys esc-b esc-f I know, but when you alt-tab between osx apps
to your terminal, sometimes muscle memory sets in)

But some other sequences just can't be done in terminal.app, while they could
be useful. Ex: alt delete is esc-d, option-delete is ctrl-k, alt-backspace is
ctrl-w, option-backspace is ctrl-u : then bash works just like the OSX default
shortcuts

Another one : want to move between tabs? I have been using applescripts in CM
(mapped to Ctrl-number, my caps key is the ctrl key) :

tell front window of application "Terminal" to set selected tab to tab 1

To me CM is the best thing since sliced bread.

~~~
recurser
The only thing that stops me from using regular terminal is that I couldn't
figure out how to make it automatically copy-on-select. Is this possible, or
do you just use command-c?

~~~
wahnfrieden
It already works, automatically. It just uses a separate pasteboard than the
native OSX one. Try selecting in Terminal.app, and then middle-clicking.

If you want it in the OSX pasteboard, you need to use cmd-c.

------
code_duck
Looks good. I really have some problems with Apple's Terminal - using the
arrow keys often leads to a corrupted display. For instance, run curl on a
long URL, hit up to edit the command and run it again - I end up with the
output of the previous command in front of my cursor, or the line floating out
in space - it's hard to describe, but something is wrong. Coming from Linux,
it's hard to accept that there's only one terminal and it isn't any good! I
think I'll use this one all the time now.

~~~
graywh
Try using TERM=dtterm.

------
krig
I decided to try this a few weeks ago and have kept using it since then. I'm
not really using any fancy features beyond the cmd+click to open URLs, but it
is fast and generally works better than Terminal.app. If all you are looking
for is an iTerm that is faster and bugfixed, this is exactly that (and more).

edit: Oh, and I should say that I can't recall it crashing even once in this
period, and I started out using my own build from git head. So I'd say it at
least feels very stable.

------
dmpatierno
Awesome. I use iTerm instead of Terminal primarily for its "Send Input to All
Tabs" feature, and it's nice to see the project continue with these
performance improvements.

~~~
davidu
That's a dangerous habit.. even if how you use it is not particularly
dangerous. :-)

------
bradly
FYI, iTerm2 is still in alpha. From the site:

"BUT iTerm2 IS IN ALPHA! The stability of iTerm2 varies from release to
release. Major features that are planned for the first full release haven't
been implemented yet, and until that day it will not receive Beta status. That
said, many (hundreds to thousands) of people use iTerm2 every day. While some
versions are more stable than others, there have been several trouble-free
versions released. It's at least worth a try!"

~~~
anto1ne
They're being cautious I guess. I've been using it for a few months now, with
test-releases, having it open 24/7, always with a lot of tabs, and it's pretty
stable (maybe 3 or 4 crashes). There's regular updates, and new features.
Great job they're doing!

------
mitjak
On the off chance someone clicks the More button and reads this, how do you
actually do mouseless selection and copy and pasting? The closest I got was
the Cmd+F search feature but it doesn't support regex so I can't exactly
search for something like "/opt/local.*$" to select an entire path produced by
pwd, for instance.

~~~
gnachman
Regex support is coming. For now, mouseless copy-paste is done with cmd-f to
find, then tab or shift-tab to expand the selection.

------
joegaudet
I love being able rename tabs, I just wish that they would unify the move the
cursor keys with the standard OS X keys.

ie: beginning of line -> command + left arrow.

I realize that people are probably used to it, but personally I like
minimizing the difference between any context switches I have to make.

Maybe there is an option somewhere I can't yet find.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
You should use ctrl-a instead. Then you don't need to take your hands away fr
the main part of the keyboard

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Also, C-A, C-E, C-K, C-F, C-B, C-P, C-N, C-Y and a few other readline
keybindings work in all standard Cocoa text controls.

~~~
losvedir
Yes, this is wonderful. Recently, I've been using emacs as my primary editor
and because of muscle memory accidentally used the movement commands in, e.g.
composing a new email in Gmail. It worked! C-a (beginning of line), C-e (end
of line), C-n (down a line), C-p (up a line) in particular are especially
useful. I just used C-p and C-n in composing this comment.

C-k / C-y is weird in Gmail, though. Anyone know why? Try replying to an
email, C-k'ing a line, going to the top, and C-y. I can't make heads or tails
of the gibberish that ensues!

------
jseifer
I've been using this for a little while now. If you've checked the "Prompt for
test-release updates" box in the advanced settings preferences you'll get to
enjoy split panes. Press command-shift-d to open a new horizontal pane. It's
really convenient and very well done.

------
abi
Question about ITerm : Is there a way to name tabs with just keyboard
shortcuts? I find it really helpful to name my tabs when I'm working
concurrently on multiple projects but the need to move my cursor is
frustrating.

~~~
KevinMS

      command i
      type new name
      hit return
      command w
    

thats the old version, not sure about this new version

~~~
abi
Ah, thanks a lot!

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BlazingFrog
The "downloads" page states that the uploaded date for the only file available
is January 2009...? Am I missing something here? As good as it may be, I'm not
sure I want to waste time using an 2-year old Alpha version.

~~~
superchink
The date is actually January 09, 2011 rather than January, 2009. It's not very
clear, but if you click through it shows the full date.

~~~
BlazingFrog
Ooops, thanks for the clarification. I should have been a little more curious.
Looks good so far. I like the shortcuts to bookmarked items. And the different
color setups for the bookmarked items.

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hermanthegerman
I always ran into problems when doing full screen applications like aptitude
(over ssh) and vim in iTerm1, so I had to switch back to Terminal.app - I hope
it is fixed now, and I'll give it a try..

------
carterschonwald
I just tested it out, and it much MUCH more easily fixes the problem that
Terminal has with having the escape sequences be correctly mapped to the right
action.

example: ^+left-arrow is easy to configure correctly!

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kqueue
I want a terminal that is consistent on all machines.

~~~
graywh
So do I; I only use Xterm (Ubuntu/Linux, Mac, & Windows).

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EmmEff
I didn't know anything about this project but as a long-time iTerm user, I'm
in!

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rufugee
I really, really wish something even remotely similar to terminator
(<http://www.tenshu.net/terminator/>) existed on OS X. Yet another reason I
find Linux a much more productive dev platform..

~~~
davidmathers
I don't understand. Doesn't iTerm2 do exactly this?

What would I get by using Terminator that I wouldn't get by using iTerm2? One
of the first things I did just now after installing it was create a window
that looks almost exactly like the one in the Terminator example screen.
Except I use 3 shells rather than 4. A full height shell on the left and 2
half height shells on the right.

~~~
rufugee
You're absolutely right. When I first looked at iTerm2 a few years ago, I
could swear this wasn't supported to the extent it is today (horizontal and
vertical splits). Apologies for the misleading comment.

------
rpug
splitting the window into multiple terminals makes me happy. this is the same
functionality I love in Terminator under Linux.

