That's ecosystem inertia: in the days of yore Terminal was pretty damn terrible, it only got tabs in 10.10 (Sierra) and xterm-256 in Mountain Lion (10.8), so people got into the habit of recommending iTerm 2 and then kept doing that even as Terminal became usable (though not necessarily great).
And iTerm still has feature edges e.g. truecolor, or better multiplexer support (Terminal only supports vertical pane splitting).
> it only got tabs in 10.10 (Sierra)
I'm 90% sure that's not accurate. It's had tabs for quite a while.
Yes I distinctly remember using Terminal's tabs on snow leopard (10.6), confirmed by [0]. Also, I believe 256color was available in that release, though I'm less sure.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6736602/how-do-i-set-mac...
Re:Terminal and shell performance
by wodenokoto on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @02:19AM
(#14802304)
Tabs is way older than Sierra. I started using the terminal about 5 years ago and have always used tabs.
> it only got tabs in 10.10 (Sierra)
I don't think that's true. I definitely had tabs in Lion (10.7) and I'm pretty sure they're at least as old as Leopard (10.5) and maybe older.
iTerm2 also has Tmux integration: treat and control Tmux windows (and thus tabs) and panes as if they were native iTerm elements, and do so using the same keyboard shortcuts. Very very few other emulators do this (on any OS).
When new Mac users ask for general app recommendations, they often seem to get immediately steered away from Terminal.app and into iTerm. I'd understand this phenomenon if T.app was horrible, but it's rather good!
(I have a theory about the long shadow of Internet Explorer causing the use of stock OS apps to subconsciously feel passè)