iTerm

I've suffered with the native Mac OS X Terminal app for over five (six?) years now. I much prefer the Konsole terminal in KDE on Linux, or even the Gnome terminal. They have tabbed terms, which helps considerably when I have dozens of terms open. The OS X Terminal app has always been adequate, but never Really Good.

Over the years I've tried all the alternatives: GLterm, iTerm, and all the Java options. iTerm came closest to what I wanted but was too slow on my old 1Ghz G4 powerbook.

But now -- now! -- I have a new Intel MacBook Pro. I am happy to say that iTerm is Perfect! Or at least, so much better than Terminal that I am just giddy.

Geek thrills.

Update 26 Sept 2007:

iTerm is a memory hog. All those tabbed sessions started gobbling ram.

But all is not lost. I discovered that KDE is now native on OS X 10.4. So now I can use konsole on Linux and OS X. It has a nice split screen feature and more customizations than Terminal or iTerm. But it does not let me use many of the same native Mac keyboard shortcuts. Copy/paste (for example) are cmd-shift-c/cmd-shift-v, which is awkward to remember. And the convenient highlight/middle-click shortcut does not appear to work either. Too bad.

Why can't I have my terminal AND code too?

More update:

Looks like OS 10.5 (Leopard) will have Terminal 2.0 with tabs. It remains to be seen whether I'll shell out the $$ for the OS just for that. I might.

File under projects/ Wed Sep 26 20:47:06 CT 2007