[svennidal]

I don’t think I would enjoy my work if I didn’t have iTerm and Vim.

[CraigJPerry]

Does iTerm give you anything over vanilla Terminal? To my eye there's a subtle delay, it must be in the order of 50-100ms in iTerm rendering that's not present in Terminal. Non-scientific measurement - i'm just going by perceived latency and comparing to something i know is a 50ms delay.

That's for interactive use, startup time is slower for iTerm2 but i don't care about that because i basically never quit the terminal.

In both iTerm2 (when i used it) and Terminal, i have a colourscheme enabled and a custom font - both of which i'm assuming have potential to slow things down.

[nrclark]

Iterm2’s remote tmux integration is a killer feature for me. Gives you a native, normal “windows and tabs” kind of feel, but for a remote connection. You can also disconnect/reconnect without losing your windows and tabs.

You don’t need to know any tmux to use it either (except for how to launch the right mode, which is easy to script).

If you spend a lot of time SSHed to other computers, I would highly recommend trying it out.

[maratc]

* Print IP addresses in green, MAC addresses in blue, the words "error" and "fail" in red, etc.

* Recognize something in the output that looks like a Jira ticket and add a link to that ticket

* Have your ssh passwords in one place and automatically enter them upon prompt

* Connect to many servers and type the same command into all of them

* Make your screen red when in superuser mode

* etc. etc. etc.

(Some years ago, I refused a company-issued ThinkPad Carbon and byod'ed a Mac because ThinkPad couldn't do iTerm2.)

[hylaride]

You can save layouts (when I start iterm, it loads multiple windows on different monitors with split panes and tabs the way I like them).

More advanced search with regex support, more advanced paste (can do character encoding transformations, deal with special characters, etc), smarter and configurable text selection, autocomplete (mixed bag, TBH - I use zsh for that), more advanced snippets for repetitive commands, and triggers to notify you when things happen (long running commands finish, certain words pop up eg "error" or "compile done").

It has a basic integrated password manager that allows me to paste passwords I commonly use in the terminal with a keycombo.

It can more tightly integrate with the shell/program. You can select a point with the mouse in vim or the shell and the text cursor will go there, for example.

Some of these may have since poked their way into the built in terminal, but these are some of the main reasons I use iterm. If you spend a lot of time in the terminal, you can enhance your productivity.

[mrweasel]

I switched back to the build in terminal app a few years ago, because I don't feel like having my environment customized and live with the defaults for almost everything. The only thing I miss is having an easy way to switch between tabs in Terminal, you can do it cmd + <tab number>, but Terminal doesn't give you the number on each tab, so you have to count yourself if you more than four or five.

[nerdponx]

Terminal.app is definitely a little faster, but the appeal of iTerm 2 for me is better control over font, colors, and keyboard shortcuts. It also provides the ability to integrate the terminal with the shell much more deeply than Terminal.app, but I mostly don't use those features.

[samatman]

Quake terminal.

I switched to WezTerm awhile ago for my main terminal emulator, a decision I've been happy with. But I keep a copy of iTerm running so I can pull down the Quake terminal. Main uses are running homebrew updates, and, perhaps ironically given the topic of this thread, sgpt.

[galleywest200]

If you are getting 100ms delay with iTerm then something may be wrong with your setup.

[p_j_w]

iTerm2 allows multiple sessions in the same window and lets you tile them however you want.