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> I seem to recall it's still a bit lacking

Not in the least since Snow Leopard, as Terminal.app has been perfectly fine (with Terminal Colors SIMBL plugin, and MouseTerm if you really want) and even better in Lion. For utmost configurability you could lean towards iTerm2, which you can tweak to no end (and arguably more than most X terminals).

Platform-specific tools from pb{copy,paste} to tmutil are truly useful and improved at each new release. Tools like brew give you all the package management love you could want, and xorg support is as first class as it could get without OSX being X-based itself.

I guess that if you want to go further than what OSX currently support, then you're looking for getty VTs, tiling window managers or Compiz customizability. As such one should probably not try to shoehorn Linux into OSX and rather use Linux (or some *BSD) directly.




Fair enough. I haven't used OSX since pre-Snow Leopard.


Unfortunately, the terminal on OSX is incredibly buggy. Keeps incorrextly coloring commands, randomly failing... Perhaps it's because of the outdated bash they use?


Ehm, I have been using Terminal.app on OS X for years now, and probably use it > 50% of my time daily (yay for REPLs), and I never really encountered any problem.

The last thing I remember was that in OS X 10.5 I had to change some locale option to have UTF-8 working properly. But that's it.

Could you give examples where Terminal.app fails?


Yes. Ignoring the home/end/page up/page down antics, this command screwed up the whole terminal for me.

grep "$search_string" -n -C 3 --color # color bugs out


Look at using iTerm2-beta.


iTerm2 is clearly a great terminal. I find it buggy when using zsh however.




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