iTerm Suggested Improvements

>iTerm is the best terminal emulator on the Mac, IMHO. It’s more customizable than the Leopard Terminal application and supports transparency, tabs, select-to-copy, middle-button-paste, a full-screen mode (with Cmd-Enter), etc.

Here are some suggestions for bringing iTerm closer to perfection, in order of (subjective) importance:

• bug: scrolling a view while more output is added (for example when monitoring an active log file) does not work reliably, the view constantly jumps to the end of the output;
• feature: have an option to briefly show tab titles while switching tabs; this is especially useful in full-screen mode, since the tabs are then not visible;
• feature: have a keyboard shortcut for moving tabs to the left or to the right;
• bug: when changing monitors (e.g. disconnect an external monitor), while iTerm is in full-screen mode, iTerm does seem to notice the resolution change, causing iTerm to show as an odd borderless window;
• bug: if iTerm is active and you switch from the current Space to another and back, then iTerm is no longer on the foreground, but the Finder is;
• bug: when switching to full-screen mode and a tab other than the first is active, then the contents of the first tab are briefly (~1 second) shown before the contents of the active tab are shown again.

 

>iTerm experience

>After using iTerm build 0.9.3.1120 for a few days, here is a summary of my experience:

• Overall, it works really well, it’s a professional application, comparable to Konsole on KDE.
• When you move a tab, then the shortcut remains the same. It would be nice if this behaviour would be configurable.
• When hovering the mouse pointer over a tab, the mouse cursor is for text editing. This is probably a minor bug.

 

>iTerm rocks!

>A colleague pointed me at iTerm at http://iterm.sourceforge.net/. It rocks. Improvements over the standard Mac Terminal application include:

• Ctrl-D closes the window.
• Tabs.
• Stored sessions.
• Selection is automatically copied to the clipboard (configuration setting).
• Middle button paste (configuration setting).

Very nice indeed!

 

>MacOS Terminal not as good as KDE Konsole

>While the Mac OS/X built-in Terminal application (v1.5) looks very well and works OK on the surface, it’s nowhere near as productivity-enhancing as the terminal emulator I’m used to, Konsole.

Some of the things I’m missing or disliking in Terminal most are:

• When double-clicking on text, slashes are considered separators, so that one can never select a qualified file name, such as /home/ernst/.vimrc.
• When you start typing, the selection is lost.
• Support for tabs.
• No drop-down with a configurable list of sessions, both local and remote.