Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

In an (absurd-ish) defense of macOS, I don't believe anyone really uses the built-in Terminal and grabs an alternative (often iTerm2).

There's also the rumor that Terminal in macOS has had a handful of developers working on it, at best, over the years. I would bet money that Apple doesn't care enough about it to bother with telemetry and/or privacy policies for it.



I bet that's true. MacOS terminal is basically still the one from next step. They've kept it up to date with changes like GUI toolkits and added a few minor things like tabs. But that's about it.

Fwiw I never bothered with iTerm, Terminal is good enough for me. It even supports some old school vt100 stuff like double width and height fonts. It's one of the better vt100 compatible ones.


I still find macOS Terminal to be noticeably faster than item. At displaying my keyboard input and shell output. It lacks other features, namely split windows, that move me to iTerm, but I do like how fast Terminal is.

> There's also the rumor that Terminal in macOS has had a handful of developers working on it, at best, over the years.

This but every app on the mac that isn't Safari.


>This but every app on the mac that isn't Safari.

Eh, I know it's a joke but there are full teams who work on Pages/Numbers/etc.


I used iTerm from 2010-2018, but then I saw a respected colleague not using iTerm, so I decided to try out the Terminal.app bundled with macOS. It actually works fine, the only difference is that it never gets slow and is available on ever mac machine.


Nothing wrong with the macOS stock terminal too. GP just pulled the macOS terminal telemetry nonsense out of thin air.

I too use iTerm for its rich features, but the stock terminal is known to have lower latency [1] so some people might prefer that.

[1]: https://danluu.com/term-latency/


I have been using the built-in macOS terminal every day for years now.


I have been an OS X user since its inception, and have only ever used the built in terminal. I spend a ton of time in the terminal and I have never felt the need to use anything else.


It’s the only terminal I use on macOS. It’s a really “gets out of your way” piece of software. And super closed source.


Yes, they never substantially upgraded it once it hit 1.0 about two decades ago.


i have been using the macOS Terminal since macOS X was a thing (with different capitalization) and since its origins in NeXTstep since around 1990.

I suspect it's the same codebase, but don't have a proof of that.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: