Not Using Terminal.app on Mac OS X?

Question

Is there any advantage to using something other than Terminal (like iTerm or whatever) on Mac OS X? Terminal seems to work quite well, but comfort is often deceptive.

Answer 1

I personally find that iTerm has more options for customization and extra features for example. I also like DTerm for shorter sessions because it is easier than calling up a full terminal for a single command. But, if you are satisfied with terminal, you don't need to switch. You don't miss out on any major features with Terminal.

For some details on iTerm, visit it's sourceforge page, but to summarize the differences:

• Full Screen mode
• 256 colors
• transparency
• better clipboard management
• better tab management
• multilingual
• bookmarks
• multiple profiles
• in my experience, better support for window titling
• Cmd-# to switch tabs

Answer 2

I too used to use iTerm until Leopard was released with the overhaul to Terminal.app The main feature which was added that caused me to use iTerm to begin with was support for tabs. They added some other nice features as well however, such as window groups, which lets you save a configuration of several terminal windows as a single entity. I have not found a reason since to have to switch back to iTerm.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

I think a lot of us started using iTerm when Terminal.app was really lousy. Supposedly Terminal.app has gotten a lot better over the years (does it have an option to autocopy selected text yet?), but we still use iTerm due to inertia.

Answer 5

This answer is very specific to my setup, but maybe it will help someone.

I use mutt to read my work email. By installing iTerm and setting up its default profile to auto-launch mutt, I am able to treat it as a full-fledged Mac application with dock icon, Alt-Tab support, and best of all: a Quicksilver trigger so that it launches whenever I hit F2.

If I just ran mutt in Terminal.app, it would quickly get lost among the various windows and tabs. It's similar to the benefits you get to running GMail in Prism, but with command-line apps.

Answer 6

Vandyke's SecureCRT was just released for the Mac. It has a nice way of remembering hosts you connect to and letting you select one of those from a list. Maybe Terminal can also do this, but its profile system is not easy to figure out, and most people I see who use Terminal.app manually type out a remote connection at a shell: ssh me@somewhere....