iTerm2 never enabled any AI features by default (it always required an OpenAPI key, which the user had to provide). The backlash was for including an AI related feature in the default build at all.
Following the backlash, I think they made it an optional plugin.
Just don't use iTerm2.
A random rockstar will come in and move the code forward 5 years never to be seen again.
But Microsoft is becoming similar unfortunately. You can see it in other software too, like them discontinuing the real Outlook and replacing it with a web one that has much fewer options, can't even be started up offline (!) and wastes more screen space. And they are moving more and more apps to electron or their own knockoff of it.
So there was some assumption on my part sorry. But informed assumption because other stuff I work with (Teams, Outlook) have only become much worse since their release :)
On my Linux machine with KDE I can open a new terminal with a single hotkey and alternate between open terminals with a second hotkey. I've never once wished for a fancier terminal than KDE's default.
Using Mac for work is a different story, though it's remedied somewhat with Rectangle and similar.
Plus, any terminal other than kitty is noticeably laggy when using other terminal programs and typing quickly, and 90%+ of my time is spent in the terminal: using custom commands and aliases, ruby shell, docker, on top of usually using vim for editing. And having great customizable hotkeys for different common functions.
Guess my point is that the terminal app you use can make a big productivity difference
It’s interesting the emotional reaction you’re having to a rather banal observation.
I installed iTerm2 on my work Mac because it came so highly recommended, but I honestly never remember to open it over the regular terminal. ~All of the features that matter to me in a terminal are features of the shell and the OS, not of the emulator itself.
If you buy a base model grandma level MacBook Air it can play Cyberpunk 2077 without breaking a sweat and somehow terminal performance is an issue.
And if all I cared about was raw performance I’d be using vim instead of VSCode. But raw performance isn’t what makes me productive.
Just because something else is faster doesn’t mean that iTerm is slow. It’s all relative.
If you are thinking about a change, console marketing would be a good place to start ;)
Additionally, there are so many ways scrolling can slow down in Neovim (e.g., bad tmux config). It's hard to take your word for it that the issue lies in iTerm2 in the absence of any sort of reproducible evidence.
Please don't be like that.
Also, any serious software has its own share of problems. Have you actually looked at the issue tracker for your supposed champion?
Similarly, if your mechanic forgets to tighten the lug nuts or leaves the oil cap off, and nearly kills you or destroys the engine, you are allowed to find a new mechanic without the Hackernews hoi polloi coming out of the woodwork saying how unfair it is, he has mouths to feed, and linking to critical Yelp reviews of your new mechanic trying to convince you of your own idiocy and wrongdoing.
This emotional attachment to a piece of throwaway software here is frankly weird.
People are allowed to have opinions. In the same spirit, others are allowed to call out inappropriate or toxic behavior.
Also,
> Hackernews hoi polloi coming out of the woodwork saying how ... he has mouths to feed
Do you not understand what people mean when they say iTerm2 is free and open source software developed in a single person's spare time, and people aren't owed any of it?
What's even more unfortunate is your take on my previous comment:
> linking to critical Yelp reviews of your new mechanic
Let me be more clear. You'll find something to pick on in any FOSS software. When you bring it up, no FOSS community will tolerate the kind of attitude you put on full display here.
Last but not least,
> This emotional attachment to a piece of throwaway software here is frankly weird.
Piece of throwaway software? Do words have no meaning to you? This is 15 year's worth of work that you're belittling. That work consists not only of coding, but coordinating with users and other software projects. I've seen him many times in issue trackers of various other projects. He's giving away all of that work for free. Imagine having to deal with people like you on top of all that.
Seriously, give the poor dev a rest. It's absolutely uncalled for to throw in a non-sequitur about some bug from 7 years ago, making snide remarks about how that's a "design choice."
[1]: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/6068#note_409052...
[2]: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/wikis/dnslookupissue
I did neglect the fact that Apple hasn’t thrown that chip in the Air yet, but I’m sure that’s only a few months away.
I love my MBP M4 Pro, but its gaming performance doesn’t reflect well what it’s capable of.
The cyberpunk native Mac release comes out this year and will almost certainly improve performance further.
Why would anyone care about ultra settings on a laptop? I don’t even set my PC desktop to ultra settings in the game and I have a current generation mid-high end GPU. Setting demanding games to Ultra just giving up FPS to not tell the difference.
30fps 1080p is basically console-level standards for a AAA graphically intense game (not esports or online shooter). And that isn’t bad at all for the processor with integrated graphics that Apple sticks in its cheapest computer and its tablets.
Your MacBook Pro M4 Pro is one of the best gaming laptops on the market in terms of hardware! Especially if you want something that’s thin, light, and quiet with good battery life and not just a thick tank of a system or a loud but thin and light gaming laptop that struggles to power and cool its dGPU.
Depending on your configuration, you can actually play Cyberpunk at high settings at or above 60FPS on your laptop. You’re vastly underestimating it!
Your laptop just needs the software to get ported, and the Mac gaming space is rapidly evolving now that Apple is paying attention to it.
There's very little I want in a terminal emulator. What I really want is a full screen terminal, with no menu bar, no delay, and no animations, which I can toggle with a global hotkey.
I just have my tiling window manager configured with a keybinding to raise my terminal. No menu bar, no delay, no animation, just type the keybinding and bam, there’s my console, covering the complete screen. Another keybinding, and there’s my browser. Another keybinding, and there’s my editor.
By default, the way MacOS does full-screen windows is by moving them to a space. Switching between the terminal and another application, e.g., Chrome, causes a large sliding animation between applications, which I absolutely do not want.
I don’t — I use Linux on my desktop. I stopped using macOS back when it was called System 8 or 9!
I think any tiling window manager can be configured to do this, but in my case I use StumpWM.
(defcommand terminal () ()
(run-or-raise "urxvt" '(:instance "urxvt")))
(define-key *top-map* (kbd "s-t") "terminal")
From others’ comments, I think that this is probably possible with a modern Mac, too, but I find that Linux is generally easier.
StumpWM: https://stumpwm.github.io/
It’s certainly not perfect, but I do prefer it. But then, I enjoy yak shaving grin
As my username would suggest, so do I. However…
> a better window manager
The bulk of my workflow involves Chrome and tmux inside my always available full screen terminal. I haven't the need for multiplexing anywhere except the terminal.
> better compatibility with server operating systems
I run nix-darwin on MacOS, and I have remote NixOS machines configured as build hosts. This is important, as everything I write is Haskell, and it must be compiled for x86_64-linux.
> a bash updated this decade
I use zsh and the bash available in the latest nixpkgs.
---
MacOS does an excellent job of managing all the other quality of life stuff that doesn't immediately concern me as a power user. A number of my current and former colleagues are all in on NixOS, but the number of times over the years I've had to wait at the beginning of a video chat for them to configure their audio settings, which sometimes means installing different drivers and/or turning their machine off and on again…
Yeah. Even as a huge nerd, I think MacOS is great.
> Looks like the maintainer tried to implement something like Windows' Recall feature - logging every input/output to a file.
After my "UNIX is cool, lets configure everything" phase, which lags behind in the 1990's decade, xterm or anything like it, is more than enough.
I don't need fancy stuff for a bunch of CLI commands.
It’s also a very popular corporate deployments where most of your command line users are web application developers who are just doing a job because it pays good money. They have no philosophical attachment to traditionalist simplicity, perhaps compassion nonfor computing at all.
I don’t blame macOS users for liking the features of iTerm2.
macOS users of Apple and NeXTSTEP culture linage don't care iTerm2 exists at all, only Linux and BSD refugees.
Most would only get it via MPW, and outside automating compiler workflows, hardly open the terminal.
People on classic Mac weren’t making web apps running on Linux servers.
Also many of those people, if they want to deploy on Linux servers, they would be better off using local Linux development, not OS X.
An example: I love everything about the Things task management app so much that I would never choose to run a desktop OS it doesn't run on.
Wtf man. Some of the smartest people I know have no interest in getting anywhere close to sw eng or working anywhere in IT, so are by definition "consumers".
Just wait until one of those "morons" operates a tumor out of your brain.
The more serious point is that Apple's primary customer base does not care for what's going on with the command line, and that's why the provided terminal is basic and feature-bare.
It's not really this intentional thing where the bare terminal is the best implementation. It's more of a Notepad.exe situation where Apple has to include one for the basic functionality of the system.
I have a souped-up zsh config that I clone to all my systems, but I've honestly never seen the point in optimizing my terminal emulator. The shell itself provides the real functionality, and it's cross-platform so by leaning on it I get the same features whether I'm on my KDE desktop, MacBook, or SSH'd in via Termux.
What power user features am I missing by ignoring the emulator and focusing on the shell?
You can hold down command and click URLs to open them. (You can actually kinda do this in Terminal.app as well by right-clicking a URL and choosing to open it, but it's a bit fiddlier, and I got used to the hover feedback in iTerm2.)
You can click to highlight entire blocks of output from commands, which I sometimes find handy when things feel like they're blending together.
It'll keep a floating copy of the previous command prompt at the top of the screen so you can see what led to whatever output is currently at the top.
None of these are essential, for sure.
Thinking there are more people who switched out of Terminal diminishes how massive computing is.
lol. lmao. When I was at Apple it was one guy to like 4 apps
Let’s not forget that basically every graphical IDE on the planet has an integrated terminal emulator, and for good reason
I’d have a smaller attack surface if I turned my computer off and did all my work for my employer with pen and paper. I’d have a smaller attack surface if I didn’t buy a Mac at all and only used a security-hardened distro.
And here you are acting like Apple is God’s gift to stability and security when every single fall season Apple’s major dot zero version updates ship with visible bugs all over the place.
And to nitpick you, the assumption that more than one person is actively working on the default macOS terminal is laughable. I doubt it even has a full time employee dedicating 100% of their time to it. The yearly release notes look like less than one person’s annual output of work.
I remember that thread on here where the person who worked on Rosetta 2 said it was a solo project for years until closer to release when the team expanded to around 10.
*cries in Xcode
No, the issue had been reported on their bug tracker twice (and closed twice) in the two years prior to their response in the thread. It took a loud enough crowd to convince them it was an issue, even though the original reports described the security implications.
https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/3688 and then https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/5303
Still,
> Sounds like a decent person who cares about his users.
Agreed!
This is sad because iTerm2 is one of the best terminal emulators out there. It's the first terminal emulator that popularized shell integration. Newer terminal emulators are still catching up, a decade later. tmux integration is another popular feature that's still unique to iTerm2. George has been working tirelessly on iTerm2 pretty much solo for 15 years [1]. To this day, he continuously brings new improvements to the terminal experience that keeps being copied by other terminal emulators. Developers benefit from his work, iTerm2 users and non-users alike. We should be expressing our gratitude instead of doing whatever people are doing in this thread.
George found this security issue the day after New Year's day and immediately released a fix [2]. That's commitment. And while the effects of this bug can be severe, most people wouldn't have triggered the bug.
> 1. Either:
> a) You used the it2ssh command, or
> b) In Settings > Profiles > General, the
> Command popup menu was set to "SSH" (not
> "Login Shell", "Command", or "Custom
> Command") AND "SSH Integration" was checked
> in the SSH configuration dialog. That dialog
> is shown when you click the Configure button
> next to the ssh arguments field in Settings.
[1]: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/graphs/contributors
[2]: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commits/master/?since=202...
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240613170001/https://archive.i...
You seem to be triggered by a perceived critical comment of a piece of software you’ve developed an emotional attachment to. I have not attacked anyone associated with the iterm2 project nor have I questioned his talent in creating a popular project or his commitment to it. Lumping me in with toxic people you encountered on social networks is completely uncalled for and I’ve never called for violence against anyone.
It's uncalled for too. iTerm2 has a good track record responding to user issues, even obscure ones involving Japanese input. The dev even listened to the demands of trolls who raided the issue tracker from Mastodon [1]. Security fixes are released quickly. Nothing about the project warrants the kind of cheap dismissal in display all over this thread.
You mentioned emotional attachment twice in this thread as reason some people have problems with dismissive, aggressive, or mean comments against iTerm2. No, it's basic empathy and appreciation for the thankless work going into this FOSS project.
I mention emotional attachment twice because twice to logical and attempted factual comments I’ve gotten emotional comments back verging on attacking me personally. I don’t use iterm2 nor is it a piece of software that takes up any mindspace for me but attacking this aggressively anyone even mildly critical because you feel like you’re part of this minority group and you need to defend yourself because you feel constantly attacked is tribalism, not empathy and appreciation.
As for the backlash, I just highlighted how 2 responses in particular seemed emotionally charged and border line attacked me for completely innocuous comments. The first was completely condescending and sarcastic while adding no additional value to the conversation on a completely unrelated comment thread where I suggested that maybe, just maybe, the terminal you choose isn't going to meaningfully improve your productivity. Your conversation has accused me of being in league with people threatening violence to the iTerm2 author and again adding nothing to the discussion about what lessons were actually learned and then attacking me and demeaning me in all sorts of ways and accusing me of saying things I simply have not. How would you describe that? A logical defense of someone I'm not attacking?
All I said is that he simply didn’t say what he learned and provided examples of what it could look like. Again, I was very specifically responding to the claim at the beginning of the thread that a mistake made is a lesson learned isn’t actually true just because a mistake is made. It’s a very basic logical fallacy made by OP. And I point out how while he says he learned something he doesn’t actually clarify what the lesson is and what steps he’s taking to prevent said mistakes in the future. You may disagree but I feel like that adds something to the discussion.
I’m pretty done talking with you since it’s clear that you will continue conversing in bad faith and ascribing to me things I simply didn’t say.
The iTerm team is just an army of one. There may be a formal analysis of the security soon.
The response to this bug is completely over the top. He found a security issue in an optional feature, immediately fixed it over the New Year holiday, and provided clear documentation about who was affected and how to address it. That's exactly how responsible disclosure should work.
The level of hostility - especially over adding optional features that people can simply choose not to use - suggests this is more about bandwagoning than legitimate criticism. We should be supporting developers who maintain critical open source infrastructure, not attacking them over a prompt response to a contained issue.
That’s not actually a postmortem of a list of process changes. Nothing about how WIP changes made it through into a code release nor in how such mistakes will be prevented in the future. There’s a much richer discussion of options in this thread of things people do to prevent things like this. For example, reading environment variables from a file that’s gitignored so that you never accidentally commit something and you don’t need to mutate code to do a config change.
He may indeed have learned from his mistakes, but I’m pointing out the flaw of assuming every mistake was treated as a learning opportunity, especially when no real evidence exists to suggest that.
> The same class of issue can occur for any other project
DON'T WRITE TO /tmp
> Safely writing to /tmp/ was solved in 1986
> This file, /tmp/framer.txt, may be readable by other users on the remote host.
Yes, there are safe ways to write to /tmp, as described in the systemd link I provided, but no, it is not safe to naively write to /tmp. Same issue as the "Many Perils of /tmp" link I provided.
A solution that no one uses is not a solution.
If you're gonna be arrogant, you better also be right.
It can easily become a problem if you don't leave it at that and add everything and the kitchen sink to it. Not having used the feature I have a hard time imagining why a terminal emulator should have SSH integration to begin with.
It's however clearly not in the "70s hardware portion" of iTerm that this issue arises. Also not in the features we've come to expect of the most bare bones terminal emulators since, like Unicode support, scrollback buffers and font rendering, or even the somewhat gratuitous features like escape sequences for RGB colors, setting the window title or sixel rendering.
This is very clearly one of the kitchen sink features, and playing the devil's advocate I should say that it reflects poorly on the kitchen sink design ethos.
Ssh integration brings lots of other "local" iterm features based on command history, etc. to the ssh environment. If you do lots of ssh work and use a lot of relevant iterm features then it's nice. Otherwise not.
Obviously, these features can be recreated with traditional tools. But these tools take time and experience to setup, and aren't naturally intuitive, despite the insistence of emacs elitists. For those who don't want to invest significant effort learning tmux, it's really nice to just check/uncheck a few boxes.
I know some people that use the game-like rolldown interface but I also don't like that one. There's a few niche things like that which make it interesting. But overall I just don't see the need.
If there's something that's sparse in options, it's Windows Terminal. Don't like that one at all (though it's better than the previous command prompt window).
One feature that's cool in iTerm2 is that you can define the left and right margins so using Vim full-screen looks nicer (I hate narrow margins). But I've switched to Sublime text for everything so I stopped using iTerm2.
I used iTerm2 for a while before realising that tmux automatically maps 24-bit colors to 256color. It works well enough for me that I switched back to Terminal.app.
Having tried various alternatives for prolonged periods, it is currently IMHO the best option when you have to work on Windows.
Mac and Linux options are just vastly ahead.
I really hate working on windows too and our company is tightening stuff down so crazily that I can hardly work anymore so I mostly work on my home lab in Linux and transfer stuff there. Totally not allowed by my employer but they make it impossible for me to work otherwise.
LastPass disagrees.
If anything, having an embarrassing issue like this is probably going to improve the iTerm2 project's security posture in the medium term. It's like that joke about firing the engineer who caused the incident, and the manager who retorts, "Why would I fire them? They just learned the hard way never to make this mistake again." (I'm paraphrasing.) I don't think that iTerm2 has had a notably high rate of critical security issues, and I suspect they won't make this class of mistake twice. (And if they do - then I will re-evaluate.)
I suppose intuitively I would think that using the default MacOS Terminal app is a bit lower-risk than using iTerm2 or any other open source terminal emulator, as Terminal is a rather sparse piece of Apple-provided software with a low pace of change. But it's also closed source and impossible to audit, so there are tradeoffs there too.