[delayed]

In what way did search get better for you with 1.4? The hotkeys to navigate search results (Cmd+G / Cmd+Shift+G) don't work for me even with custom keybindings as documented and the search box doesn't get prefilled with current selection - the _only_ two features that I'd ask for besides the actual search working. Were you able to solve these in your setup?

No shade to ghostty btw, it's an amazing product that I use every day. I just have to accept the lack of some of this usability polish.

Aside from the outstanding tmux integration (and search):

  - Font rendering (and cell size control) is still better on iTerm2, although Ghostty has been rapidly gaining
  - Compact theme with thin titlebar tabs
  - Profiles
  - Window arrangements
  - In-terminal API (which Mitchell has acknowledged as a useful feature)

The iTerm2 settings/preferences are a mixed bag. On the one hand, discoverability and settings search. On the other hand the panel is insane. Also iTerm2 doesn't have Ghostty's straightforward prefs file. I guess I want the best of both worlds: A well-organized settings UI, with search; and a file I can easily neovim.

Image support is much better in iterm2, you can open them, save them - then you can easily download any file. And fonts also look much nicer.

Vertical tabs is why i keep using iterm

I was on iTerm2 for a long time, but nowadays I find myself using: https://bateri.dev

I'm also still on iterm2. I don't quite get what people want from a terminal emulator, for me it's mostly window management: being able to open iterm2 fullscreen with a hotkey, having panes and tabs, that's it.

I wouldn't even need panes and tabs if I used tmux, but I can't be arsed: I used to but now much prefer using a GUI and not have to do tabs/scroll/selection differently than every other application.

That actually touches on a killer feature of iterm that I have yet to see elsewhere. If you start or resume a tmux session with the -CC arg, it integrates with iterm2 gui natively

All your tabs, splits, etc become tmux equivalents. It's very nice

I switched from iTerm to Ghostty because:

- iTerm started pushing a ton of updates to add features that absolutely no one wanted. AI chat in the terminal emulator (not within the terminal), integrated web browser, etc.

- Some of those features turned out to introduce major vulnerabilities, so they had to push even more frequent updates to patch them. It’s extremely annoying to have your work interrupted by multiple update prompts in a day from your terminal.

- iTerm has visual glitches (line artifacts appearing when windows are opened/closed) on non-Retina monitors.

That said, I miss the GUI for changing settings. Ghostty’s settings file format requires looking up keys every time you want to change something, and it isn’t nearly as powerful as iTerm profiles.

I chose Ghostty instead of Wezterm specifically because the settings file format makes it possible to get a GUI some day. I don't even know if it's officially considered for Ghostty but at least it can be done, even by an external tool.

VSCode started this way and for a long time settings could only be updated by editing a JSON file. The fancy settings UI was added much later on.

Wezterm config being Lua makes it almost impossible to get a UI ever. Also I don't understand why a terminal emulator config needs to be written in a general purpose programming language.

A big reason I gave up iTerm2 was that it didn't use a plain text file as its native configuration format -- I was just too obsessive about wanting my config in git to be able to handle it!

I ditched iTerm2 a few years back, when I opened MacOS Terminal, typed in it - and it appeared to be predicting my keystrokes it was so much faster. I'd never noticed how slow iTerm2 was until this. I understand its performance has improved since, not sure by how much.