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Back in the day when Tiger ruled the world, iTerm was a must have for me if only just for the tabs feature that Terminal didn't have. After Leopard came out Terminal got several improvements, like supporting tabs and implementing profiles.

Since that day I just don't see the need for iTerm, but I still notice there's people using it. There's something I'm missing?

Why should I use iTerm over Terminal?

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8 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

Two reasons I prefer iTerm: 1) 256-color support, and 2) full-screen mode.

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Lack of 256-colour support in Terminal.app is perhaps the only reason why I would consider using iTerm2. – ayaz Nov 23 '10 at 18:19
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Note, that as of Mac OSX Lion, Terminal.app does support 256 colors and full screen. – pablasso Aug 21 '11 at 0:44
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up vote 3 down vote

Have you seen iTerm2's features? It does things no other terminal does: you can go back in time like TiVo, it has autocomplete, mouseless copy-paste, it stores more than one string in its clipboard, and there are more keyboard shortcuts than in Terminal.

http://sites.google.com/site/iterm2home/screenshots

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Pleae link to here sites.google.com/site/iterm2home/iterm2-vs-terminal-app – Yar Dec 18 '10 at 21:12
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up vote 1 down vote

For the sake of giving you an answer, one reason to use iTerm over Terminal.app that I can think of is being able to set the title of the terminal window when using the fish shell, as noted in this other superuser.com post.

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Fish is essentially buggy in this regard. As I’ve noted in my answer to that post, fish only updates the title if $TERM is one of the following: xterm, screen, nxterm, rxvt. Otherwise, it never calls the fish_title function. Change your TERM value to one of those (e.g., xterm) to get it to work. This isn’t specific to Terminal. The same issue occurs with iTerm, it’s just that Terminal’s default value for TERM is xterm-256color (on 10.7 Lion and later, xterm-color on earlier versions) and iTerm’s default value is xterm. See my answer to that post for details. – Chris Page Feb 8 at 10:26
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up vote 1 down vote

Terminal has busted positioning support. The new roo ascii flash mechanism is disabled for Terminal but enabled for iTerm.

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Can you elaborate? Better yet, can you file a bug report? – Chris Page Feb 8 at 10:18
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up vote 0 down vote

Also, under Snow Leopard, Terminal now shows an annoying dialog before opening an ssh: URL.

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To elaborate: If you click on an ssh: or telnet: URL in an application like Safari or Mail, the URL is marked “quarantined” for security reasons. This causes Terminal to warn you before opening a connection with that URL. The goal is to prevent users from being tricked into clicking an ssh:/telnet: URL and exposing their user name and TCP/IP address to a remote host. – Chris Page Feb 8 at 10:21
So its trying top stop publicly available information being leaked? There is nothing secret about username, intact in the UNIX world its supposed to be public, and an IP address is public anyway, could just use a HTTP link for that one. – ewanm89 Apr 22 at 11:06
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up vote 0 down vote

I use iTerm as no need to hit cmd-C to copy just select it and for paste hit middle mouse button

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Note: Although Terminal doesn't automatically copy the selection to the clipboard, Middle-Click pastes the current selection, by invoking the Edit > Paste Selection command. So, if you merely want to select some text and then paste it into the same terminal, you can do that with Middle-Click in Terminal. You can also select text and then drag it a few pixels and release to paste it. – Chris Page Aug 29 '11 at 7:18
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up vote 0 down vote

I use iTerm because I can't get Terminal to have mouse support with vim and other apps.

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The MouseTerm bundle can be used to enabled Terminal.app to send mouse events to applications running within it instead of eating them up. I wrote a blog post about it recently over here: ayaz.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/… – ayaz Nov 23 '10 at 18:18
Why is mouse support important to you? How do you make use of it? Are you just talking about being able to tell Vim to select text, or are other terminal-mouse behaviors important to you? – Chris Page Feb 8 at 10:15
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up vote 0 down vote

Reasons I still use iTerm:

  • Full screen
  • Copy on select
  • Remove scroll bars (and still be able to scroll back)

Lion now has full screen support, plus obviously the iOS-inspired scrollbars mean it doesn't show the scrollbars, except when scrolling. I don't think you can hide it ALL the time though.

As for copy on select, the first and final answers on this question should help you out: Mac Terminal Copy on select like Putty

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As of Mac OS X Lion 10.7, Terminal supports Full Screen, and Lion's iOS-style "overlay" scrollbars are effectively the same as "removing" the scroll bars. – Chris Page Aug 29 '11 at 7:21
Thanks @ChrisPage, that's pretty good news. Still no copy on select? (I'm sure I won't be upgrading to Lion until it has a few more point releases under its belt.) FWIW I'm currently using iTerm 2. – draebek Sep 11 '11 at 23:36
As always, if "copy on select" is important to you please file an enhancement request (or bug report) with Apple: bugreport.apple.com By the way, what do you expect it to do if you select several megabytes (or gigabytes) of text? Should "Select All" copy to the clipboard or only selecting with the pointer? – Chris Page Sep 13 '11 at 3:05
Other than people who come from other Unix platforms are used to it, what makes Copy-on-Select so attractive to you instead of selecting and then performing a Copy command? Copy and Paste are the primary reason the Mac had a Command key in the first place, and it's at the bottom left of the keyboard for convenience, because Z, X, C and V are there (Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste). These seem like they're a hairs-breadth difference in convenience, plus, requiring an explicit Copy command means you can select text to perform other operations on it without wiping out the clipboard contents. – Chris Page Sep 17 '11 at 2:02
e.g., you can use Edit > Paste Selection or just drag the text a few pixels and release it to paste it without disturbing the clipboard, and you can drag selected text to a different window or application. – Chris Page Sep 17 '11 at 2:05
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