* The gap between Windows Manager and Terminal is not as wide as with most terminal emulators I know in the linux world (copy&paste, drag&drop, search-function, mouse support, easy (!) image rendering support out of the box...)

* User accessible features like the tmux integration (look at this: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html)

Just to mention a few advantages.

Of course most of the awesome apps like tmux just need you to learn a bunch of new commands but I can't imagine myself doing that a lot over my whole lifetime.

Some things I just want to use without a steep learning curve and apps like iTerm2 prove that this is possible.

I use the shell a lot since many years but I'm far from using it the way I could imagine it in the 21st century (the shell is still the superior interface for computers in my opinion but I'm afraid this topic didn't really get much attention & innovative approaches in the last decades).

It's probably because it has a lot of features that are not unique, but you won't find all of them in a single terminal emulator on Linux.

Example, I don't know about a terminal on linux that both works as a drop down terminal (quake-like) & supports inline images.

Or split screen & password manager.

For the split screen functionality, I’d recommend tmux or Terminator. If you try w3m on xterm, you’ll notice that inline images can work. Could someone enlighten me as to why inline images are useful in the first place?

Imagine something like Jupiter Notebooks as shell.

That was the REPL of non-UNIX graphical workstations of uore, and inline images was naturally part of it.

One thing I have not found (admittedly I have not searched much) is to be able to detect patterns printed on screen and launch triggers. E.g.: if something prints on screen "created a job XXX" I can color this text blue and make it an URL pointing to example.com/XXX

Look for "Triggers" under the "Advanced" tab of your profile. You just need to enter a regex and specify an action.