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.
Comic-style illustration of what all those 4xx HTTP response codes mean.