iTerm2 is incredible. I recently tried alacritty, though, and was amazed by how much faster it is with screen redraws on my 2014 Macbook Pro. I was shocked the first time I used mouse scrolling in vim through Alacritty and found that it was as snappy as in a native app; it never occurred to me that, even for a small pane, the bottleneck was in the emulator. I had to reimplement some of my favorite shortcuts for tab/pane management in tmux, but overall everything is running lightning fast thanks to alacritty's optimized, GPU-accelerated rendering. Alacritty also uses a dirt-simply YAML file for config (which I prefer to a GUI solution) and is cross-platform (which means I'll be able to install this same setup, with tweaked shortcuts, on my Windows box next time I use it).
The new iTerm features sound really awesome, but the one thing I'm already missing badly is inline image-rendering via escape codes. I had a great workflow set up on for viewing astrophysical data products on a remote analysis server using the itermplot matplotlib backend to render plots directly in my terminal from ipython. I'm still planning on firing up iTerm2 for that use case.
All that said, iTerm2 is the best terminal emulator I've ever used, especially when you're first learning things. I probably wouldn't have been able to switch to tmux as easily if I hadn't already used it a bunch through iTerm2's beautiful tmux integration (I'd already configured some tmux functionality for that use case). The aforementioned image-rendering should be a universal feature for terminals. And though the input and redraw lag are higher than Alacritty or Terminal.app, it's always been fast enough. I still recommend it to people with Macs who are just starting to program.
That said, if you're a speed addict and want something with limited but easily-configurable features, give Alacritty a try!
[edit] I should also mention that, if you're willing to put in more effort, you can implement a ton of iTerm2's visual bonuses (like the status bar and pretty icons) with a combination of a Nerd font [0] (particularly a pretty modern one like Iosevka [1]) and an advanced tmux configuration [2].
I think I've thanked you before in the HN comments for it, but thank you again!! itermplot is one of those great tools that actually makes things just work in a pinch. I wrote/maintain a low-latency gravitational wave/high-energy neutrino joint source search, and crazy stuff is always happening. Being able to throw together plots and just see them in my terminal right away helps me maintain my sanity ^_^
The new iTerm features sound really awesome, but the one thing I'm already missing badly is inline image-rendering via escape codes. I had a great workflow set up on for viewing astrophysical data products on a remote analysis server using the itermplot matplotlib backend to render plots directly in my terminal from ipython. I'm still planning on firing up iTerm2 for that use case.
All that said, iTerm2 is the best terminal emulator I've ever used, especially when you're first learning things. I probably wouldn't have been able to switch to tmux as easily if I hadn't already used it a bunch through iTerm2's beautiful tmux integration (I'd already configured some tmux functionality for that use case). The aforementioned image-rendering should be a universal feature for terminals. And though the input and redraw lag are higher than Alacritty or Terminal.app, it's always been fast enough. I still recommend it to people with Macs who are just starting to program.
That said, if you're a speed addict and want something with limited but easily-configurable features, give Alacritty a try!
[edit] I should also mention that, if you're willing to put in more effort, you can implement a ton of iTerm2's visual bonuses (like the status bar and pretty icons) with a combination of a Nerd font [0] (particularly a pretty modern one like Iosevka [1]) and an advanced tmux configuration [2].
[0] https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts
[1] https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-...
[2] https://github.com/samoshkin/tmux-config