I know it's largely personal preference but are there any strongly compelling reasons to use iTerm2 over stock Terminal on macOS in 2025? Despite recommendations, I've been wary of security and privacy issues much like this SSH bug.
The killer feature for me is Edit>Selection Respects Soft Boundaries, which lets you copy text from inside windows defined INSIDE the terminal - like tmux or emacs splits - where iTerm figures out that, e.g., a pipe character is a window boundary.
Two more:
2) if you accidentally close a tab/window, you have a few seconds to hit ⌘z and the window will reappear as if you never closed it!
3) Minimum color contrast. If your terminal color scheme and what you're running's color scheme interact poorly to create something that would be unreadable, iterm notices and you can have it override those colors to be something of higher contrast, automatically.
But that's just my killer features. iTerm is like Word - it is a bloated monster with thousands of features. Nobody needs them all, but nobody agrees on which ones they need.
Meh, I've used it numerous times in situations like setting up some clustered software to explore for the first time. Just fire up your 3 vms, ssh into each of them in their own panes, hotkey to activate broadcast mode, start creating/editing your config(s) and tuning your server.
It really is useful in the right scenarios, sure you shouldn't adopt it as your "official method for provisioning production servers" but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a legitimate use case or is a "crutch".
Ok those things are interesting though not killer level for me. But I moved away from Mac now because I found their stuff too opinionated. I use KDE now. I wonder if iTerm2 also exists on Linux if it's open source?
Yes this is indeed exactly why I moved from Mac to KDE and why I donate to them. They still understand that in this day and age of opinionated design. I have KDE very heavily customised, but the cool thing is that unlike Gnome I didn't have to use a single plugin to do it (which always causes issues upgrading). Everything I wanted to change was available as a setting somewere.
And yeah I use Konsole, it's great! <3
MacOS wasn't so bad in the beginning, it used to be a Unix with good UI, but over the years Apple has been very busy replacing extensive settings with annoying on/off sliders (or nothing at all). Especially on macOS Server (if that's still a thing).
I reported https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security#apple-terminal... to Apple ~2 years ago and they still haven't fixed it. It's not as serious as some vulnerabilities though and likely doesn't deserve a CVE, would be nice if they fixed it though.
(Finding this can be hard because Apple only link to release notes for currently supported versions, the pages are still around if you know the URL or you can find them via searches if they happen to be indexed still.)
So the only reason I switched to iTerm2 was because I wanted my terminal to change color when I ssh into different hosts. If I ssh into my work machine the terminal turns blue. If I ssh into my home machine the terminal turns purple. I'd tried to do this with the default terminal but ran into issues with it getting confused depending on how a session ended. People suggested iTerm2 because it supposedly solves this. And it does, at least for me.
This! I've played with wezterm and ghostty but haven't been able to get this working there, so I keep coming back to iTerm2 for this exact feature - so that prod servers have a red background, etc.
My only issue with kitty and tmux is that I always have to copy over my terminfo files manually or else I get a 'xterm-kitty': unknown terminal type error.
This, of course, depends on how long you’ve been using macOS and what long list of quirks you’ve acquired.
For me, „just” being able to use a full-screen-mode-that-is-different-than-native-macOS-full-screen is worth it; but I imagine there are maybe like seven other people out there for whom it matters.
This is the only reason I use iTerm2. I can view the terminal full screen while also instantly switching to the browser or other windows, without the animation.
Thank you for reminding me why I should just return to iTerm! It might seem minor to some, but this is such an essential 'feature' that it probably overrides all other differences, for me.
One small question, though: are you aware of anything that 'native' full-screen does that 'bespoke' full-screen misses out on? Any disadvantages whatsoever?
I want an actual-full-screen, with menu-bar and Dock invisible, with no window chrome - not merely “fill the maximum allowable space by the OS, as if dragging the windows corner with mouse”.
BUT I don’t want to use the native affordance for that, since that makes it its own “Desktop”, and I can no longer switch to it using my Snow Leopard-era muscle memory of using ^-<number> to switch between them.
I am fully aware that this is incredibly niche requirement, but it is a dealbreaker for me :)
I saw that Ghostty kinda supports this; but then disables tab support if this is enabled, which, also an obvious dealbreaker.
Instead, I would recommend Ghostty [1] terminal recently released v1.0 by one and only Mitchell Hashimoto of Hashicorp fame. It is OSS native cross-platform application (not an Electron one). I have been using it for the last year (private beta) on Mac and Linux and it rocks.
What does tmux control mode do in practice? I use both (iterm2 and tmux), but not for this specific reason. I have just used both as a default for a long time.
Yes, this was such a nice feature when I used a Mac. And indeed the session seamlessly works as a normal tmux session. I believe WezTerm does tmux-style terminal multiplexing, but doesn't integrate with tmux.
I use the graphics support for making quick & dirty scrips for managing images (mostly for checking labeling and things like that where I don't want to bother creating a full web UI).
I tried Ghostty for this but couldn't get the images to display as quickly or in full resolution, but it's very possible I was holding it wrong. I'd love to switch, honestly, if anyone has a recommendation for how to make it work as well as the iterm2-tools Python package.
I also use multi-pane mirroring for managing some machines at home that I haven't bothered making more automated.
I use it primarily for its split pane functionality. Invaluable if you need to see multiple things happening on the same machine at once. I work in data science and often have several long running jobs on a single server, a notebook server, htop/iotop, nvidia-smi, or simply just having different panes cd'd to different directories - with iterm you can organise to a single terminal tab for each machine (including local), or group tabs across machines if they are for related work.
native Terminal.app doesn't have true color support (24 bit colors). I was happy using it but wanted to try some fancy vim themes.
I stopped using iterm after it did the chatgpt integration, which was a bridge too far for my tastes and landed on wezterm. All of the alternatives have nits.
It's dumb, but Terminal.app is about eight years behind every other macOS terminal in supporting true color mode. Feels like sort of a table stakes feature in a modern terminal, and makes me suspect Terminal.app is not a high priority for Apple. The people want pretty editor themes!
I just have been trying ghostty recently - the biggest usability issue I’ve immediately run into is a lack of cmd-f to search text (as far as I can tell) —— I’m having to copy everything into a text editor then search. I never realized how often I used that it until I lacked it.
I got tired of weird sketchy seeming behavior in iterm2 (it'd hang randomly when accidentally sending binary streams to stdout; it'd take forever if I asked it to search my many tb of buffer, etc). I switched to xquartz and xterm, which was fine; I had to retrain my fingers back to whatever they'd been trained to do in 1998, but they got there.
But probably that's terrible advice for 99.8% of people out there, probably more like 99.998, or even more 9s.
Both are very competent terminal emulators. Just use either and you won’t miss much. I started using iTerm before the Terminal.app redesign (which was very much needed) and kept using it mostly for the tmux integration (which is a strong reason to use it). Nowadays, I would be happy using either. Ghostty is fine as well, though not as polished yet.
I just like having it docked to the top of my screen, and accessible via a global shortcut.
I'm sure there's a thousand others that do both of those things, but I adopted iTerm2 about 10 years ago, and it hasn't given me cause to investigate others.
When I’m forced to use something else, I miss eternal-terminal atop tmux control mode and iterm. It’s total bliss and there’s no other terminal emulator on any platform that can compare.
If the stock terminal app supported more colors (idk what the official term is lol) I’d be fine using it. I don’t use any fancy iterm features anyway. Fish + zellij is all I need!
I stepped back into macOS for the first time in ~8 years and was disappointed by Terminal. To be honest, I think Windows Terminal is much better, which feels a bit weird to say.
Two main reasons I switched is that iTerm can actually display bitmap fonts without mangling them (Terminal has anti-aliasing always on) and that it handles the difference between left and right Alt (needed because AZERTY layout + emacs).
