Pretty much the first thing a desktop environment has to do is establish an abstraction layer for filesystems, so that desktop-enabled applications can have a consistent way to talk about files. Both Gnome and KDE have a VFS layer (GVFS and KIO, respectively).

A good portion of what KIO and GVFS do should be done at a lower level. Instead we get this weird situation where I can "see" a file in KWrite, but I can't see it the shell or in a non-KIO-enabled program.

Interesting, when I'm using Mac and I miss KDE's Konsole, which is superior IMHO.

Which features are you missing from ITerm2?

- Alert when current command finishes running.

- Download files with clics

- Drag-drop files to upload with scp.

- The tmux integration. Being able to use the "native" split instead of tmux splits is cool.

All those are important to me because I'm always ssh'd into a personal box, and they just make the whole terminal experience feel like I'm on my local machine.

Then there's the Marks feature, which is just friggin great, the fact that it supports a bunch of pretty useful escape codes (and they're even documented[0]), and lots of useful (but minor) features like the Caputred Output[2] that just make the whole experience pleasant.

Nowadays I'm just using i3 with urxvt. I'm hoping that one day, I'll have the time to write a tmux integration using i3's IPC, which would bring me 75% where I want.

[0]: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html

[1]: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html

[2]: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-captured-output.html

It's kinda odd that the best terminal app is on OSX but not in linux :(. iterm is one reason I am postponing switching to linux from osx for my work laptop.