HACKER Q&A
📣 yesenadam

How do you use iTerm2? Its best features?


What are the things people use it for that good ol' Terminal bash can't do? The features that make it worth using. Thanks!

I recently started using iTerm2 on a mac, it seemed so cool. But I quickly got sick of it being so slow to startup, sometimes 10 or 20 seconds, and even sometimes slows/freezes the machine with a few windows open. Seems very bloated. So I stopped using it before I got to know its best features. (I had the daily tips appear daily, but never learnt anything from that.)


  👤 ksaj Accepted Answer ✓
You might have something in your .bashrc or similar that is tripping it up. On my system, the main account runs just fine. But when I log in under one of my work-related accounts on the same machine, iTerm2 takes an extra click before it will load (the first time fails, second time succeeds). I've never found out why that is, but I haven't really been bothered by it since the workaround for me is simply remembering to click-pause-click.

Having said that, from the regular account I don't find it slow at all.

The feature I like most - tabs. My workflow consists of a lot of tmux, and tmux+tabs makes things awesome. I also like that iTerm2 puts all your terms back in the same directories you left off on if you restart the terminals or reboot.


👤 mtmail
"Little known features of iTerm2" https://banga.github.io/blog/2020/03/02/little-known-feature... (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22461605)

I don't use most of the features, set the color scheme once after installation. The slow pasting mode, tab duplication, clicking on links, showing timestamps is enough. On my computer it becomes slow after 3GB memory usage (tailing lots of logs in the background or such).