iTerm for Mac0.10

For those who are on Lion, and having issues with growl notifications via growl 1.3x, the dev had sent me a work around via the bug reporter, that modifies a plist. Although this is said to be fixed in an up coming update, I have found a much simpler fix that also seems to solve the issue. NOTE This is for Lion Users only Download a program called Growl Version Detective within the program, click on the framework tab. NOTE be sure item isn't running before continuing to the next step. locate iterm in the application list and click update FW. the framework will be updated to 1.3.1, for me this seems to have solved the problem and is much simpler then messing with a plist for those who want quick and easy. Hope this helps!

Development continues with the iTerm2 fork: http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/

Please build in something like Visor (For Terminal) in this! I'd love only having to press a hotkey to bring out a Quake style launch for iTerm!

I still use over terminal.app. Why? Two reasons: 1) iterm had tabs before terminal, so I got used to it and it's shortcuts, 2) ability to set "characters considered part of word" in mouse preferences. This allows double clicking on a path or url and getting the whole thing all at once. Sounds like a little thing, but it is one of those little things that makes life so much easier. I don't understand the transparency issues, perhaps that was with an earlier version. I like being able to turn transparency on and off command-U (or setting a bookmark with always off). More convenient than terminal.app, IMO.

Just a quick query about what this application is capable of. Is it possible to connect via a serial connection and modem? I still have a lot of devices which must be managed via serial connections. Because of this, I'm still using ZTerm, which hasn't been developed for quite a few years. I could do with an alternative and am hopeful that this may be it.

i've been using iTerm for a while. works great! thanks the developer for their hard work.

If I update iTerm to 0.9.5.0915. I'll lost all my preferences. I'm using 0.9.5.0517 and Leopard 10.5.4. In fact I cannot update to any later version than 0.9.5.0517.

iTerm Resurrected!!

iTerm is stable than me and still has some of those missing features that Terminal left off (most notably the tabs change color if activity happens in a hidden tab). I'm sticking with iTerm. Thanks for continuing development on this great app.

This terminal allows using normal keys (Page-Dn, End etc.) in fullscreen terminal apps (vim, mutt, mc, etc.); overall the keyboard feels more adequate (coming from Linux/FreeBSD, I have to admit). Apple Terminal can be configured(!) to allow this for most keys, but it does not work well for me (10.4/10.5). Therefore, iTerm is often the first application I start and the last I quit.

I tried iTerm for a day or two. In theory the features were very nice--tabbed browsing, full-screen mode, etc. But in practice, iTerm was intensely frustrating. Apart from the annoying transparency issues mentioned in a previous comment here, the biggest problem I encountered was iTerm's speed. (I ran it on an 800MHz G4 iMac.) I don't quite understand how an all text program can be less responsive than, say, an image-heavy app such as Preview or Safari. The keys felt very slow, and there was a noticeable delay between typing and screen response. Turning off anti-aliasing helped a bit, but not much. Switching tabs was also surprisingly slow--slower than switching tabs in my favorite web browser Camino. Likewise, when running the email-client Mutt, there was a noticeable delay when redrawing the screen for each new message. (The messages are stored locally, so the delay is not due to remote access.) In a very unscientific test, I tried iTerm side-by-side with Terminal.app using Mutt and the latter won hands down in redrawing the screen. If you're looking for speed in a terminal app, go with xterm (or uxterm for UTF-8 people). Lightning fast! No delays at all in redrawing the screen in Mutt. You'll need to install Apple's X11 package. When you first open X11, you get a really crummy looking terminal. But this can easily be changed by modifying the xterm line in the .xinitrc to something like the following: uxterm -fg black -bg LemonChiffon -fa 'Monaco' -fs 12 -geometry 80x40 -tn xterm-color & You get a yellowish background in this instance with an anti-aliased Monaco font. (WARNING: Some of the antialiased fonts look horrendous in xterm.) For different colors see the following guide: http://mkaz.com/ref/xterm_colors.html

The transparency that cannot be permanently turned off was a showstopper for me, before I even got to the point of trying to run anything in the terminal.

Can anybody here provide a summary of what makes this better that the built-in Terminal.app program?

The best improvement I have noticed has been the screen refresh speed in 0.9. However, it does appear to be more prone to random crashes that cannot be tied to any specific activity that I can see. I have experienced this in both version 0.9 and 0.9.1 (for Panther). CPU usage is a bit higher if the screen refresh slider is left at the default setting. It appears that is where it needs to be for functionality. I enjoy using it but will have to wait until such time that particular bug is addressed. If there is information I can provide to assist, please let me know. I'm running it on 10.3.9

iTerm opens all new windows and tabs transparent. Maybe it's just me, but I do not like transparent windows, and have to hit Cmd-U after opening each new tab. The workaround would seem to be to write an AppleScript to open new tabs, but why should I have to go to that trouble to turn off a "feature" that should have been set by global preferences?

Version 0.8 is much, much better than past versions in terms of stability, at least so far. There are still some weird quirks, though. For example, I was using the "Font Size Follows Window Resize" option and it started resizing in ways that weren't even following my mouse drags of the resize tab. Also a major shortcoming to my mind is that it only offers either confirmation of closing windows or not confirming. It doesn't have the option to confirm only when their is an active telnet/ftp/whatever session running in the window. Still, it has tabs and a lot of other nice features and it now seems to be fast (past versions were very slow) and so I'm going to try using it on a daily basis now.

Version 0.8.2 appears to eventually go into a state where it takes up over 25% of my CPU when it is sitting idle for some time. Quitting and restarting causes it to settle back down to 4.5% (with top running in its window). This was not a problem with 0.8.1, to which I am reverting until I get a MacIntel box and have to switch.

I feel compelled to amend the hasty review I gave this application. iTerm works just fine on MacIntel but does NOT seem to save its preferences. I'm sure this will eventually be corrected, but at this point I have to downgrade it a bit.

I would really like to use this, but in testing it out, I had it crash on me within a few minutes. I had been playing around with tabs, creating and closing them. Moving their location to bottom and side, etc. Tried setting the text to resize with the window, etc. At some point it all went *POOF*. I've never had Terminal.app crash, and it occurred to me that I have to have a terminal program that doesn't crash. So, yes, I want a terminal program with tabs (though iTerm looks ugly/busy with tabs) and a number of the other features in this program, but in a short test at least, the stability seems shaky. Definitely will be checking out future versions and I hope they can make a slicker tabbed interface, but I won't be using version 0.8.2.

Man, am I happy to see this application updated to run on MacIntel. version 0.81 was seriously broken. Thank you Developer.

Better than terminal.app in almost every way. Only real negative point is the amount of RAM it uses... a bit more than 3 times as much as terminal.app.

Wonderful featureset. However, noticeably slower than Apple's terminal, which itself is slow. I'll be back when it's a bit faster. Tabs are great, please continue to improve your terminal.

I'm a long time iTerm user and I use it everyday! The new version is fine as always but I encountered one problem: The menu command Show bookmarks and the Bookmark icon in the toolbar both don't work.

The only problem with this application is that they are running out of ways to improve it. I use this 12+ hours per day, have it on 6 machines, and it has never been problematic. On the contrary, it has greatly enhanced my productivity. The new bookmark drawer is a nice feature, and the update didn't break anything. Please keep up the great work. I have also found the developers to be very helpful and responsive. I hardly ever user Terminal.app or xterm. iTerm is far nicer to work with Reasons to use this instead of or in addition to Terminal.app: Bookmarks, Tabbed windows (you can have a bunch of terminal sessions running but need have only one window open), middle button click to paste, left button highlights text with the optional setting activated it copies the text into the clipboard (a nice feature of X-windows terminals). There's other nice features that I have never tried.

other than tabed windows... why? I've never had an issue with Apple's terminal. Granted I'm not the most hard core terminal user ever, but why reinvent the wheel?

One thing that speeds up iTerm immensely is using unsanity's "WindowShadeX". In WindowShadeX, set double clicking the title bar of an app to make it transparent, then load iTerm, double click its title bar to make it transparent, then do it again to re-set it to opaque. This overrides iTerm's own transparency settings, which always seem to be -on- even if transparency is set to zero - like the transparency is still being calculated in the background. In any case, once this is done the app feels twice as quick, scrolls faster, drags faster and overall works how it seems it always should have.

Broken donwload link. The correct one: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/iterm/iTerm-0.8.0.dmg?download

iTerm is getting better by every revision, but it's still too slow compared to GLTerm or Apple's Terminal. Emacs under iTerm is too sluggish to be usable.

I like the speed but this version is a step back as far as usability. I assume it is only a temporary problem but I am having a real hard time assigning display preferences to ssh sessions. They now have "profiles" and I can create one with the colors I like but it is not obvious how to use it. Changing current settings and selecting the "save" menu item saves it to "Default" no matter what I do. Usually a very beautiful program, I didn't realize how intuitive the preferences were until they changed it.

Much faster than previous versions; faster even than Apple's terminal, I think. The new preferences are a little muddled, but I'm sure they'll work themselves out with time. ICeCoffEE's 'cmd-click URL to open it' no longer works because of the changes to the text engine--the sooner they have a replacement for this, the better.

It's slow but promising... speed improvement needs to be done.

Full featured but slow.

This version contains some huge memory leaks. Still using about 3-5% when it's idle... This is bad, bad, bad.

No speed improvement since 0.6 .. That's is NOT usable on my iBook G3 366Mhz. Even with transparency and anti-aliasing disable, it's terribly SLOW. I found the Apple terminal slow, but it's nothing compared with iTerm. Glterm have less features, but it's fast. Konsole on Apple X11 is even a lot faster. And it's not only scrolling, I can type a work faster than it's appear, there's a problem here. Ok, nice features, I like the Tabs, it's look nice, but it's useless when it's SLOW like that. Phososhop 7 is slow on my iBook, I understand. iMovie, QuarkExpress6, IllustratorX etc.. I understand too, but iTerm is only a terminal program and it's look harder for my iBook to run it than those. Please, try to Optimize it for speed..

iTerm has everything I want to make it the perfect terminal emulator, except for one fatal flaw. The handling of the "meta" keys feature is broken. Terminal.App handles meta in a way that is consistent with emacs, iTerm doesn't. For example Meta-Delete should be "delete-word-backward", but neither "Option key as:" META or +ESC works--both turn Option-Delete into a dead key: no character is generated at all. ESC Delete works as expected, though, so it's not that the terminal emulation somehow breaks OS X's emacs-consistent behavior.

I'm having trouble with the "option key" settings in 0.7.6 (B). If I set it up to be "meta" it doesn't seem to do the right thing, and typing "option n" followed by just about anything kills the window. Did I miss something?

If only it had the option for a custom background img.. I just love Eterm for that..

Custom ASNI color settings have been moved to Bookmark session settings. Each saved session can have its own color settings.

What the heck happened to the ability to choose custom ANSI colors? That was the only reason I used iTerm over Terminal.app. I wouldn't mind if 0.7.5 honored 0.7's preferences, but it doesn't.

Very cool. This 0.7.5 version is really usable now. The little annoying problems that used to prevent me from switching from Terminal app are gone now !

Yeah, Monaco won't work for you in iTerm. Monaco does not have all the graphical characters. Don't know how Apple makes it work. Use FreeMono that comes with iTerm. You can email me at ujwal at users dot sourceforge dot net, or you can just visit iTerm's sourceforge page http://sourceforge.net/projects/iterm/ and to view and log bugs and feature requests.

I am using the same font (Monaco 11) that I am using with Apple's Terminal.app. Is there a way I can email you or do you have something like Yahoo messenger?

Hi, I am one of the developers. To the person who is having trouble with centericq, please make sure you are using a font that has the graphical characters required by ncurses. As of version 0.7.0, iTerm comes bundled with the FreeMono font that has all the required graphical characters. I just briefly tested centericq, and it work fine for me.

can you support a term type of vt100-color? Centericq has extra linefeeds that make it unusable in iTerm. :( :(

So far so good. Lots of potential. I will use it as a replacement for Terminal.app.

Tabs on my shell windows? Right click to open my shortcuts on a new shell (on a new tab)? Just love it.

May be everyone here have a powerful G4. That program is unusable with my 366Mhz G3 iBook. I feel like remoting a computer via Telnet with a 2400baud modem. I like the tabbed windows, like Konsole, it's great but it's To slow. When that program will be fast like GlTerm, it will rock.

This rocks! Glad the delete key thing's fixed now. Just wished it coped properly with escape codes in linux man pages!

The idea behind this program is great... I particularly love the tabbed windows. iTerm has the potential to be to Terminal what Chimera is to IE. If the bugs are fixed, and mouse support is added for those programs like emacs which can take advantage of it, I'd seriously consider dropping Terminal entirely for this. As it is, though, one of my criteria for a Terminal app is that it work well enough to be generally usable, and the current version of iTerm fails in that respect. The first two programs I tried, man and emacs, both failed. When I open man, pressing the down arrow key scrolls down, but only after flashing some sort of escape sequence in the status line... only a minor bug, but scrolling up doesn't work at all. Only the first line of the screen updates. In emacs, the screen also doesn't get updated correctly. If I type "Foo," then back up to the beginning of the line again and type "Bar," sometimes it works right, but sometimes the word "Foo" gets overwritten, and only "Bar" is visible. If I force emacs to redraw that text (by simply scrolling down in the file and back again), then the line does indeed read BarFoo, as it should.

I make fairly heavy use of the command line and find it very convenient to have separate shells active on various machines and directories. When transitioning from Linux+KDE to MacOS X, I therefore found myself dearly missing something like the Konsole application (the "screen" program that comes with MacOS X didn't really do it for me). iTerm appears to be exactly what I wanted. Version 0.6.0 made it look nicer than KTerm, and with 0.6.1, my main remaining reservation (copying behavior of trailing spaces) seemed to have been addressed.