[Myrmornis]

I use iTerm2 with tmux every day (but I don’t ssh into machines often nowadays) and I feel oppositely — I don’t get the attraction of the tmux integration. But maybe I still haven’t understood it, so please feel free to tell me what I’m missing. For me, the purpose of using tmux on my laptop is session, window, and pane management. (Perhaps my favorite tmux feature is zoom-pane.) So I find that the iTerm2 tmux integration takes away everything I liked about tmux, and makes using tmux feel like using iTerm2 without tmux!

[CJefferson]

I love tmux just for letting me run long running sessions on remote machines. I don't like tmux's window management, I want to use my terminal, scroll back with mouse, that kind of thing. Tmux integration is therefore for those of us who love their GUI terminal :)

[nobleach]

You can always `set -g mouse on` in your `tmux.conf`. But that has the nasty downside of stopping you from being able to right-click and copy text to your OS clipboard. It does let you pane select and scroll with a mouse though.

[rovr138]

For someone that doesn't like or understand working with tmux windows and panes, it brings the benefit of running sessions in remote servers, being able to disconnect while still using their GUI.

[sxv]

Out of curiosity, why do you use iTerm2? As a heavy tmux user, I made the switch back to Terminal recently and never looked back.

[Myrmornis]

- visor mode: I always have a fullscreen terminal one keypress away

- genuine fullscreen mode, not the crazy Apple thing where you try to fullscreen an app and it creates another "workspace" or "desktop" or something and you can no longer switch efficiently between fullscreened and non-fullscreened apps without seeing some sliding animation.

- Powerful keybinding support for simple and sophisticated cases. E.g. I use the "send raw bytes" feature so that I can switch panes in tmux with a single keypress, without needing to explicitly send the tmux prefix key. And all that sort of configuration can be version controlled in JSON (you certainly wouldn't want to get something like that working and then commit it to an app config dialog for safe keeping)

- settings for everything

- "dynamic profiles" You can version control your config as JSON

- configurable click behavior ("smart selection"). See other subthreads in this discussion.

- color themes and convenient color switching

Probably others.

With respect, I believe you're making a mistake. Check out some of the things I mentioned. (What does Terminal.app give you over iTerm2?)

[jimsmart]

> visor mode: I always have a fullscreen terminal one keypress away

Last time I tried this (which, admittedly was sometime back), I found that this was ugly as heck if one has multiple screens and them set to be above one another-ish (e.g. on laptop with desktop screen(s) offset above) - it turns out that iTerm was just sliding the window in from 'offscreen', which if one has windows as I do, means it appears on an upper window.

It's slick if your screens are in 'acceptable' positions for iTerm - otherwise it's an ugly mess. Which is a shame, because I quite like / want this feature.

(Not that Terminal offers this at all mind)

[Myrmornis]

(Replying to sibling due to HN constraints)

@jimsmart Yes I can believe that might take a bit of tweaking to get right. The author (George Nachman) is very responsive though, so I'm sure he'd appreciate the report. It might be reported/fixed/discussed already?

https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/8536

[sxv]

> What does Terminal.app give you over iTerm2?

Ease. I've been down many a custom-config-rabbit-hole but these days I find greater pleasure in paths of least resistance. I'll admit, however, that I love my hyper key and BetterTouchTool gestures.

[mercer]

I don't use tmux locally, but I find iTerm2+Tmux invaluable when it comes to managing my servers. for each of them I have an ssh command that automatically opens all the windows and panes for that particular server. It even persists colors I give various panes so I don't accidentally work in the wrong one.

Saves a bunch of time!