[egwynn]

Hyper certainly looks cool, but “looks cool” doesn’t cut it when it comes to winning me over for what might be the #1 most important tool I use on a daily basis. Is there a page telling me why I should use this over my current terminal (iTerm2, FWIW)?

[jacobwg]

This is my personal experience, but for me, considering that the terminal is so frequently used, the small improvements add up over time.

I found the font rendering more pleasant on the eyes. I'm not entirely sure why this is, and I'd be interested to see what options could be tweaked in iTerm2 to make it visually similar, but Hyper just "feels" nicer to look at for me.

Second, I've found it useful to be able to customize my terminal with web technologies. Previously I used a custom prompt with lots of different bits of context (git status, node environment, python environment, Kubernetes context, etc). With Hyper it's been fairly easy for me to create a local plugin that renders a statusbar with those bits of context. It's built with React, CSS, etc, so personally the ability to easily adjust and create is super nice.

Two things I miss from iTerm2 are infinite scrollback and the ability to search output with Command-F. I would assume there's a plugin out there to handle searching, I just haven't looked that far into it yet.

Performance of Hyper 2 was adequate enough for me to switch. I'm interested to see how Hyper 3 compares.

I'm also interested in iTerm2 3.3, which overhauls the iTerm2 UI.

tl;dr - small customizations add up. It's basically the same migration as when I moved from Sublime Text to Atom (though I use VS Code now)

[intertextuality]

You say the small things. You mean like, how quickly the terminal opens and how quickly text gets painted on the screen?

iTerm2 blows hyper out of the water in those regards, and it actually does add up. Styling otherwise really isn't that difficult, but it begs the question of why do you need so much information? Are you actually developing or just spending time tinkering on your terminal to have bells and whistles that you don't actually even look at? Surely a simple colorscheme + font that aliases correctly should be enough to "feel nice" to look at?

The only thing keeping me from the better performance of alacritty is iterm2's infinite scrollback and some other miscellaneous features that alacritty will probably never get.

[jacobwg]

Yeah, I mean all this is very subjective. For me I don't care about terminal open speed since I keep the app always running, and my criteria for text rendering speed is it has to be fast enough to not be annoying, which is the case for me.

It's less about having lots of info and more about being able to control how it's displayed. I really only have a few things I keep around in my prompt / status bar, and they're all immediately useful to the task at hand and are reflective of the current project I'm working inside - I jump around a lot between tech stacks for personal and work environments, and being able to know where I am is important:

- what's the git status of this project

- is this a Python or Node app

- am I inside a virtualenv

- what's the Kubernetes cluster context name

- what's the currently active Kubernetes namespace

I really hate visual clutter, so the ability to move some of this stuff to a status bar rather than keeping it around on every repaint of the prompt, and be able to exactly style it as desired with CSS, is what attracted me to Hyper. This applies to the whole UI, if there's any element I don't like, I can change it.

Similar to you, I've considered switching to Alacritty, but it doesn't hit the features/customization to performance ratio for me.