I spend a lot of my time in iTerm, but even on my macbook pro it’s far from slick. A month or so ago I tried their latest nightly build, but it was very buggy (crashing when I resized the window) and no faster. So I’ve mainly been waiting to see if someone came out with an alternative.
As a result, I was very pleased to see this post from Rob Orsini as I was scanning Planet Ruby on Rails before starting work this morning. It seems the iTerm developers have completely replaced their tab code, fixed some memory leaks, and come out with nightly builds that are much more stable and far faster.
If you’re an iTerm user, go grab the build of the latest CSV.
Tags: development tools, iterm, macbook pro, terminal
But why use it?
The only real feature I see in iTerm is the tabbed window. Is it really so hard to master the Cmd-~ keystroke which lets you switch between regular Terminal windows? Or for that matter, use ‘screen’ to provide multiple terminals in the same window. That way you can stick to the out-of-the-box Mac OS X software.
Yeah, the tabs are the only feature I make use of, but I like them 🙂
‘screen’ might do what I want, but I like having a visual reminder of the different sessions I have running without having lots of windows. My screen is cluttered enough as it is, and tabs provide that visual indicator.
Yeah, tabs would be the one feature that I would want. I don’t suppose anyone has found a way to patch the regular terminal to have tabs?? Its odd, but selecting the exact same font settings in iTerm that I have in the Terminal results in a less readable font. Odd.